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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



DISCO URSES OF KEIDANSKT 



DISCOURSESOF 
KEIDANSKY 

By Bernard G. Richards 



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SCOTT-THAW CO. 

542 Fifth Avenue 
NEW YORK MCMIII 



Copyright 1903 
by Scott-Thaw Co, 

{Incorporated) 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

APR 8 1903 

Copyright Entry 

CWSS (Ky XXc. Ne 

COPV B. 






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i^f'rj/ Edition Published 
March 1903 



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TT?^ Heintxemann Press Boston 



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Note 

THE majority of these papers have appeared 
in the Boston Evening Transcript, and 
thanks are extended to the editors not only 
for their permission to reprint the same, but also 
for the many kindnesses they have shown my friend 
Keidansky and myself. 

All the papers have undergone many changes, and 
numerous corredlions and additions have been 
made. B. G. R. 



IntroduBory 



HERETICAL, inconoclastic, revolutionary ; 
yet the flashing eye^ the trembling hand^ the 
stirring voice held us spellbound^ removed all 
differences^ and there were no longer any conservatives 
and extremsits; only so many human beings led onward 
and upward by a string of irresistible words, 
" Outrageous heresies ^^ some said, yet those who paused 
to listenfor a moment lingered longer, and as they heark- 
ened to the harangues, marked the words and followed 
the flights of fancy, it came to them that these dreamers 
of dreams and builders of all sorts of social Utopias up- 
on the vacant lots of the vague future; these ribald reb- 
els holding forth over their glasses of steaming Russian 
tea in the cafes, or on the street corners under the float- 
ing red flag — that they were but a continuation of the 
prophets of old in Israel. 

^hose who paused to listen were loath to depart and 
some prayed for a perpetuation of the things that came 
out of a throbbing heart and soaring mind. Faint re- 
flexions here of the outpourings of a soul, but mayhap 
they will shed some little light upon the inner life of 
that strange cosmos called the Ghetto and point again 
to the Dream it has harbored and cherished through 
the harsh realities of the centuries. 



Discourses of Keidansky 

^^ Why perpetuate these things^' you wrote to me^^ since 
that life is so fast slipping away from under my feet; 
pra5lic ability is urged on every hand, and to-morrow I 
may be led under the canopy, perhaps ele£led to the 
presidency of a congregation, given full charge of an 
orthodox paper, or put into a big store on East Broad- 
way, and then, what I said would only stand out to 
taunt and menace me about the life that could not be. 
Besides, I may become so radical that I shall not want 
to say anything^ Tes, we change, and the castles we 
build in the air become tenement houses, and we are 
either the tenants, or worse, the landlords; but ^^ life 
has its own theories ^^ and if the fine poetry of youth 
be reduced to plain prose in later years, and wisdom 
teach us to be stupid, why, we are still apace ahead and 
those who will come after shall put their shoulders to 
the Dream and move it up at least one inch nearer to 
life, ^'■And if the dreamer dies,'' as you said yourself, 
" will not the Dream live ever on?'' 
Surely I And let me send you the glad assurance that 
death will come sooner than the presidency of a syna- 
gogue, 

Tou are safe, Keidansky ; the orthodox will never for- 
give you. 

We change, yet those who fail also come to their own, 
and even lost souls make great discoveries. Did you not 
say that " Life is the profoundest of all platitudes ? " 

B, G, R, 

New Tork, March, 1903. 



Contents 



I 


Keidansky Decides to Leave the Social 






Problem Unsolved for the Present 


I 


II 


He Defends the Holy Sabbath 


7 


III 


Sometimes He is a Zionist 


13 


IV 


Art for I'olstoy's Sake 


23 


V 


^^ 'Three Stages of the Game'* 


22^ 


VI 


^^The Badness of a Good Man " 


41 


VII 


^^The Goodness of a Bad Man " 


S?> 


VIII 


^^The Feminine Traits of Men*' 


65 


IX 


The Value of Ignorance 


75 


X 


Days of Atonement 


85 


XI 


Why the World is Growing Better 


9S 


XII 


Home, the Last Resort 


105 


XIII 


A Jewish Jester 


117 


XIV 


What Constitutes the Jew? 


129 


XV 


The Tragedy of Humor 


^39 


XVI 


The Immorality of Principles 


149 


XVII 


The Exile of the Earnest 


157 


XVIII 


Why Social Reformers Should be 






Abolished 


165 


XIX 


Buying a Book in Salem Street 


173 


XX 


The Purpose of Immoral Plays 


183 


XXI 


The Poet and the Problem 


193 


XXII 


^^My Vacation on the East Side " 


199 


XXIII 


Our Rivals in Fi^ion 


211 


XXIV 


On Enjoying One's Own Writings 


219 



DISCOURSES OF KEIDANSKT 



I 

Keidansky Decides to Leave the Social Problem 
Unsolved for the Present 

THE ledure at the Revolutionary Club, Ca- 
nal street, was over, the audience rose, one 
by one, and ere their departure, those who 
made it up, lingered on for awhile and stood in lit- 
tle groups of two, three and four, and earnestly dis- 
cussed the things that had been, and particularly 
the things that might have been, said on the sub- 
je6l. The peroration was delivered with fervor and 
gusto by one of the " red ones " of the Ghetto. It 
was on " The Emancipation of Society from Gov- 
ernment," a theme packed with meaning for those 
present, and as almost everybody was willing to be 
interviewed on his or her impressions, there was 
quite a little exchange of opinion afterwards. The 
speaker, besieged by a small circle of questioning 
dissenters and commentators, was holding an infor- 
mal, compulsory reception. A few hard workers of 
the sweat-shops, who slumbered peacefully during 
the discourse, came up towards the platform to tell 
the speaker how well they liked it. 
It was during this hobnob medley of varying voices 
that I introduced Keidansky to a lady, a friend of 
mine, who, having heard of the wicked things he 
says, and the queer things he does, desired very 
much to meet him. 



Discourses of Keidansky 

As she greeted him the lady rather perfundorily 
remarked : 

"And so you are a dreamer of the Ghetto ? " 
"No, Madam/' Keidansky answered somewhat 
brusquely ; " I am a sad reality." 
"A sad reality ? Why so ? " Smilingly, pityingly, she 
queried. 

" Oh, the reasons are not far to seek, not easy to 
find, and hard to relate," he said demurely. " Be- 
sides, why augment the soporific tendency P We have 
just listened to a ledlure.The monstrous evil of gov- 
ernment still exists. The tremendous task of its ab- 
olition is still before us." 
"Yes, I know ; but tell me, please." 
" Well, then, if I must speak of myself — and I like 
nothing better — I will tell you." He cast down his 
eyes and spoke quickly, as quickly as he could think 
of the right words, which he was trying to find with 
evident effort. "A dreamer disillusionized, a great 
might-have-been become small, a would-be vid:or 
vanquished, a social reformer forced by society to 
reform, a herald of a new dawn lost in the night, a 
rebel rejeded by the rabble, a savior of society with- 
out even the ghost of a chance to become a martyr, a 
visionary grown wise, an enthusiast at last awakened 
to things as they are, an idealist knocked out by cold, 
hard fads — don't you think it's a sad reality? I — 
we — wanted to do so many things and — 
" I wanted to change the world, and the world has 
changed me so that I am beyond recognition.That 's 

1 



Keidansky and the Social Problem 

a little and belittling way the world has with all who 
wish to save it. We — my comrades and I — want- 
ed to transform this earth into a Heaven, and we 
came near going to — the other place. Pardon me, 
madam, but some of the fellows actually went there, 
one sent me his regards the other day. He is at court 
now, working for the king of the ward — assistant 
chief wire-puller, or something. Good salary; hard- 
ly any work to do. Better than Socialism, he says, 
under which system he would, at least, have to per- 
form a few hours' work a day. But there was a time 
when he would walk six miles — he had to walk then 
— to hear a denunciation of the present political 
parties and the evil powers that be. Now he would 
talk six miles to win a single vote for them. The 
others who have gone have not fared so badly as 
he: they have not grown so wise, have remained 
poor, and, more or less — honest. But as to the things 
that might have been. There were great books to 
be written, which were abandoned because — oh, 
well, it is so much bother to deal with publishers. 
There was a powerful educational movement to be 
started in the Ghetto, which has also been relin- 
quished for the manifold blessings of ignorance. 
" Why, I wanted to solve the social problem, and 
now I do not even see my way clear to do that. 
You see, we all came here with a smattering of 
Socialistic ideas and Utopian ideals. We brought 
them over from Russia — the land of the knave 
and the home of the slave — and we wanted to see 



Discourses of Keidansky 

them realized in this country, where the gigantic 
development of industry and the trusts were illus- 
trating the beautiful possibilities of Socialism. That 
idea appealed to us Jews, at least, above all others. 
And we set ourselves with great zeal to the task 
of its promulgation. The common ownership of all 
the means of production and distribution of wealth, 
every member of society contributing to the work 
of the nation; those who do not work, neither shall 
they eat, etc. — we had everything down fine — too 
fine. If we were asked, who shall do the dirty work 
under Socialism, we answered, the bosses of the 
present political machines. 

"And we demonstrated by all the proofs furnished 
us by our leaders — at the rate of ten cents a pam- 
phlet — how the great change was inevitable from 
Marx's material conception of history and our own 
hysterical conception of materialism. The rich had 
not as yet consented to the equal distribution of all 
wealth; but the poor had; they were fast coming 
our way, and we were all getting ready for the great 
change. Oh, when a fellow gets the social revolu- 
tion into his head he can see millions of proleta- 
rians marching to victory, and then the Cooperative 
Commonwealth looms up big before him in all its 
Bellamy glory. But after awhile, and a few gentle 
hints in the form of hard knocks — confound it — 
comes the calm, sober, second or second-hand 
thought. Socialism? What an arch bureaucracy, 
what a preposterous attempt to harness life with a 



Keidansky and the Social Problem 

monstrous system of rules, regulations and restric- 
tions ! What an endless chain of entangling laws, 
what an appalling monotony of order ! The indi- 
vidual gagged, bound hand and foot by an over- 
whelming mess of statutes ; not permitted to tell 
the truth unless it is officially recognized as truth 
by the State. Thousands of laws to be broken every 
day and as many heads to be mended. Heaven save 
us! you cry out, and you come to realize that it 
is n't because "a lot of contemptible capitalists have 
paid him for it" — as it has been alleged by some 
of us — that Herbert Spencer has declared Social- 
ism to be the coming slavery. Perhaps Spencer 
was n't wrong, after all ; and the best solution of the 
social problem you had becomes a terrible problem, 
and you lay it on the table, or throw it into the 
waste-basket. 

"Then comes communism, as preached by my 
friend John Most and comrade Peter Kropotkin; 
individualist anarchism, as presented by Benjamin 
R. Tucker and others. Beautiful theories these are, 
enchanting studies ; but, alas, only theories, so vague, 
so fantastic, so far off, so dimly distant, so elusive. 
And the problem is so stubbornly real, so disagree- 
ably near, so puzzlingly capricious, and so spiteful- 
ly independent of all solutions, that — oh, well — I 
have n't as yet solved the social problem, and I don't, 
as yet, know when I will; but perhaps the problem 
will stay long enough, until I get ready to do it." 
The speaker looked touchingly perplexed as he 

s 



Discourses of Keidansky 

continued: "I cannot find my way through these 
things, and don't know the way out. The problem 
is vexing and vast ; the solutions various and volu- 
minous. The solutions are in themselves highly 
problematic. Our doubts are endless, our igno- 
rance is infinite. Finality is the most fatal folly. 
Nothing is certain but uncertainty; nothing is con- 
stant but change. Even the dream of transforma- 
tion becomes transformed. Life has its own theories 
and is regardless of our patented plans. The logic 
of events makes our own systems illogical. The 
wind of Time blows out our little labelled lanterns. 
Time puts all our wisdom to shame. Life is so 
pitifully brief, and the problem that has troubled 
the ages cannot be solved in a day." 
" But what are you going to do about it ? " I in- 
terrupted. 

" Why, I have decided to leave the social problem 
unsolved for the present,*' he answered. " If I could 
spell English well I would write a book showing 
why I refuse to solve it for the present; but as it 
is, those who wish to know what I write will have 
to learn Yiddish. However, from what I know of 
the English language, I like it immensely. It is so 
rich, so big, has so many words; a splendid means 
for concealing one's thoughts. And the English 
and Americans, who master it, know it and appre- 
ciate the fad. But I see they are putting the lights 
out. We '11 have to leave the hall now. Good-night, 
good-night. Pleased to have met you." 

6 



II 

He Defends the Holy Sabbath 



E are so happy in this country that we 
must celebrate even when we don't want 



W .. ^ 

▼ ▼ to,' said a Hester street storekeeper, 
and then he quoted the words of the Psalms in the 
traditional monotone : " And they who led us cap- 
tive requireth of us a song." 

He stood on the sidewalk in front of his dreary and 
dilapidated grocery store. It was Sunday morning. 
The chosen people of old who have elected to come 
to the chosen country of to-day moved up and down 
in large numbers, almost crowding the street. They 
stood in little groups idly, and conversed loudly in 
a more or less Americanized Yiddish, often lapsing 
into a curious English of their own. Their dress and 
outward appearance denoted the degrees of their 
Americanization and prosperity. There were those 
who live in the Jewish street, or in the immediate 
vicinity, which is also within the Ghetto, and others 
who, after spending their first years here, have now 
travelled by the road of success to " nice, high- 
toned" distridls, such as Allen street in the West 
End. On Sunday they all come down there, for then 
you can meet everybody, all the " Landsleute,"you 
can hear all the news, and there was a time when 
Sunday was the liveliest day on the street. Thus 
these people walked up and down the thorough- 

7 



Discourses of Keidansky 

fare, while some stood in small gatherings and talked. 
Women met, chatted for a few minutes, and then 
took half an hour in parting. 

All the stores were closed, all the places of business 
deserted, and it seemed strange and incongruous to 
see all these people out on the street. It seemed as 
if the people were there for no purpose, as if they 
had nothing to do. One wondered, at first, if it were 
a holiday; but the absence of even a suggestion of 
the spirit of Sabbath soon made it clear that there 
was no religious meaning in this day, so far as the 
Hebrew people were concerned. Aside from that, 
the people would not be out so if it were a holiday. 
They would be at home, observing and celebrating 
the day. It appeared as if their idleness was forced 
upon them ; they suggested gatherings of workers 
whoare out on a strike, waiting for settlement. Upon 
investigation the stranger found that this was an en- 
forced idleness, a compulsory holiday. The Chris- 
tian Sabbath was forced by law upon the Jews, who 
had celebrated their Sabbath the day before, and 
they could not begin the week's work until their 
loving neighbors were through. And this, too, was 
the week before Passover, the busiest season in the 
Ghetto. 

My friend, the storekeeper, stood upon the side- 
walk in front of his emporium and continued his 
plaint, not without quaint gestures : 
"They call this the freest country on earth, and yet 
here we have been compelled to close up our stores 

8 



He Defends the Holy Sabbath 

two days in the week for the whole winter. A num- 
ber of us have already gone out of business, and the 
Uppermost only knows what will happen with the 
rest. We cannot make it pay in ^nq days; rent is 
very high, profits are small, and around here times 
are always hard. The poor people who trade with 
us only know prosperity by sight or hearsay. 
" We have preserved our Sabbath through all the 
persecutions and sufferings which we have endured 
in the past centuries. Our Sabbath is as dear to us 
as life itself, and now it is endangered by the laws of 
this free land. We cannot afford to close our stores 
on both Saturday and Sunday. Sunday used to be 
one of the best days of the week for business. It is 
the first day of the week with us. It is the day after 
our Sabbath, when every household needs a new 
supply of food. It is also the day on which our 
people from the country, having a day off, come in 
to buy their goods — that is, they used to come in 
when we were permitted to keep our stores open 
on Sunday. Now all is changed, and the business is 
going down and down. We will not keep open on 
Saturday, and the police won't let us keep open on 
Sunday. It is outrageous, the way they treat us; it 
is scandalous, I say." 

Keidansky, the radical of the Ghetto, is quite a 
unique, native charader. He is the young man who 
once told me that he had more good ideas than were 
good for him, and I believe now that he was right. 
I met him one day in one of his resorts, a "kosh- 



Discourses of Keidansky 

er " lunch room of the Jewish distri6l. I asked him 
for his opinion on the Sunday question, and he told 
me what follows — among other things — over a few 
glasses of Russian tea: — 

" So far as I 'm personally concerned, one day is as 
good as another for a Sabbath, and we can't have 
too many of them. Any day on which we can rest 
and be at our best, is a holiday. I am too religious to 
be pious. I can san6lify as many days as I can cele- 
brate. The new conception of 'kosher' is whatever 
is wholesome, digestible and tasteful. To be really 
happy is to be holy, and those who have lost this 
world will not be entrusted with another. I hate 
uniformity, and it 's very tiresome to rest when 
everybody else rests; but since it would be most 
convenient to suspend business and activity when 
the majority of the people observe their Sabbath, 
since the Christians do not want to rest on the same 
day that the Lord rested, and decided to get ahead 
of God and repose on the first instead of the seventh 
day, why, let it be Sunday, then — as far as I am 
concerned. Convenience is the first step to happi- 
ness, and tolerance is the beginning of philosophy. 
There is nothing intrinsically sacred in any day ; it 
is only an artificial measure of time, and time is only 
a blank space, absolutely worthless unless we write 
upon it with our deeds. All days are made holy or 
unholy by what we do in them. So, you see, so far 
as I am concerned, Saturday or Sunday, any day, 
will do. Personally I have never been compelled to 

lO 



He Defends the Holy Sabbath 

close up my store. I have never been so unfortunate 
as to own a store. This, however, is only my point 
of view. 

" One of the most immoral things I know of is to 
force your own petty brand of morality upon the 
lives of others, and I can hardly conceive of any- 
thing more irreligious than forcing your particular 
religion upon others. To respedl the religion of your 
neighbors is a deeply religious principle, and those 
who have no religion at all can almost make up for 
it by respecting the religion of others. Religious 
liberty is one of the most precious principles of our 
country, is it not? And here this fundamental prin- 
ciple is rankly violated by the law, or rather by what 
I think must be a silly misinterpretation of the 
law. There are thousands of Jews encumbered by 
and compelled to rest on, if not to observe, a Chris- 
tian Sabbath. I do not like to believe with some of 
the Zionists that the seed of anti-Semitism has been 
sown in this country and that a good crop will soon 
be up to encourage the restoration of Israel to the 
Turk's Palestine. I am rather inclined to think that 
this idea is anti-Semitic. But certainly the stranger 
in this country would be extremely surprised at the 
way the Jews are treated here just now in regard to 
the observance of Sabbath. Who is to blame ? The 
law or those who enforce it? Oh, the law. But per- 
haps our people now suffer the consequences of hav- 
ing been among the first to bring laws into the world. 
When people saw that the world was too good they 

II 



Discourses of Keidansky 

began to make laws, and ever since they have kept 
up making and multiplying them faster than even 
the lawmakers can break them. Why, one can hardly 
walk two steps before he finds that he is breaking a 
useless law which it is very tempting to violate. I am 
not so radical as some of my friends. I do not be- 
lieve that all the stupidity of the age has been in- 
carnated into our laws. A great deal of it has been 
left in our customs, traditions and superstitions; 
but a law that interferes with religious liberty in a 
free country is bad enough. 

" I tell you it is just exasperating to walk through 
the Ghetto of a Sunday now and see all the places 
of business closed up and all the public resorts 
abandoned. The poor housewives of the Ghetto 
whose cupboards are all empty and who need so 
many things on Saturday night, after their Sabbath, 
and have to wait until Monday — it is a great hard- 
ship for them. I tell you it *s dead wrong to force 
this blue law upon the people. The Hebrew, to 
whom the traditional Sabbath is as dear as life, ought 
to receive due consideration, or rather the right to 
do as he pleases, in so far as he does not harm others. 
The law should have nothing to do with Sabbath, 
anyhow. People can never be made religious by law. 
If you are going to write about it, tell the whole 
story and show how ill-treated we are. Perhaps you 
can convert the Christians to the spirit of Chris- 
tianity. Let the voice of the chosen people be 
heard ! " 

12 



Ill 

Sometimes He is a Zionist 

WORD flashed across the cables that Dr. 
Theodore Herzl and other leaders of the 
Zionist movement had held a favorable 
interview with the Sultan of Turkey, and the fol- 
lowers of the cause — the restoration of Palestine 
to the Jews — were all in a flutter of gladness. As 
it was interpreted by the faithful, the vague, mea- 
gre cablegram meant that the Sultan was willing, 
that he was hard up, and that the Holy Land was 
for sale. And who could doubt when this was an- 
nounced by the New York Yiddish dailies, under 
four-column headlines? No one could doubt but 
the jester. He said that this only proved that the 
Yiddish papers also had big type in their compos- 
ing rooms. He said that the truth about a certain 
movement could not be found in any party organ. 
In fa6t, if one wanted the absolute truth about any- 
thing he would advise him to go home and sleep 
it off^. 

But serious and sane folk will ask no jester for ad- 
vice. The jester can only add to the sadness of the 
nations ; but he cannot impair the faith of the be- 
lievers. So the Zionists were rejoicing while their 
opponents were debating in the lighter vein, and 
laughing at the mistakes of the so-called new Moses 
and the errors of his followers. 

13 



Discourses of Keidansky 

The news had also reached Keidansky's circle, and 
the question was taken up again for consideration. 
They were all at Zarling's on Leverett street, where 
the "kosher "eatables are inviting, where tea is Rus- 
sian, the newspapers Yiddish, and the attendants 
members of one industrious family, ranging from 
several bright pupils of the granlmar school up. 
The poet, the young lawyer, the short-sighted med- 
ical student who has for many years been writing a 
scientific work, the Anarchist orator in embryo, the 
flower vendor and undiscovered inventor of an in- 
genious self-lighting lamp and a wonderful fuel- 
saving stove — they were all there, and, of course, 
Keidansky was with them. They all sat about a lit- 
tle round wooden table in a corner of the big dusky 
store, pouring out wisdom and drinking tea. The 
long row of "kosher" Vienna wurst hanging over 
Zarling's brass-railed counter were mocking and 
menacing the vegetarian of the group as he was 
munching a cheese sandwich. 
They were all heartily opposed to Zionism. Each 
one had the solution for the social problem, which 
would also settle the Jewish question, and Keidan- 
sky said that it was highly problematic whether 
there was such a thing as a Jewish problem. How- 
ever, they all had plans for making this a better 
world, plans which the Jews were eminently fitted 
to help to carry out, and the benefits of which they 
would reap in the form of an ideal state of society, 
with universal brotherhood, and without racial ha- 

14 



Sometimes He is a Zionist 

tred and anti-Semitism. They took Zionism se- 
verely, scathingly to task, and as there was no Zion- 
ist present it was an easy victory. The Jewish State 
was nipped in the bud, or rather abolished ere its 
establishment. The poet and the orator sailed 
heavily into the " dubious personality of Dr. Max 
Nordau," one of the leaders of the movement, and 
thus again avenged themselves on the man who, in 
his gentle booklet on "Degeneration," so wantonly 
threw so much mud on their revolutionary idols. 
Reference was made to the demolishing review of 
the Do6tor*s book by the only and original G. Ber- 
nard Shaw, and Whitman and Wagner and the oth- 
ers were saved. 

Keidansky listened silently to all that passed, looked 
into a book and sipped his tea. If the conversation 
was not good he could find something in his book, 
and if the book was not interesting he could at least 
enjoy his tea. So he once said when told that he was 
not attentive and not true to the spirit of" the order 
of midnight tea-drinkers." 

Everybody had spoken, and I turned to Keidansky 
for a word. " Sometimes," he said, " I am Zionist, 
and all longings leave me and I yearn for naught 
but the realization of the old, long-cherished, holy 
dream that our people have carried along with them 
and fondly caressed through their cruel exiles of the 
ages — the restoration of our never-to-be-forgotten 
home, Palestine. The passion for the race returns, 
the old feeling of national pride and patriotism 

15 



Discourses of Keidansky 

comes back and takes its old place, the conscious- 
ness of Israel awakens within me, and I am com- 
pletely swayed by the mastering desire to see Judea 
'emancipated, regenerated and redeemed/ 
" I feel again the unity I have forgotten. The old 
Messianic hope looms up big before me. The 
Heimweh of the long-lost wanderer, the grief- 
stricken, menaced nomad takes possession of me. 
I feel the terrible danger of dissolution: it is so bit- 
ter to stare destrudion in the face, to contemplate 
annihilation of so long and so miraculous an exist- 
ence. I feel that there is no place like his old home. 
The homeless Jew must return to Palestine. The 
big world is too small. It has no room for him. 
Good or bad, he is always offensive, and he is ex- 
alted only to be cast down into an abyss of misery. 
Civilization is not even civil, and it has no hospi- 
tality for its earliest Hght-bearer. The world is a 
wretched ingrate. We have given everything, includ- 
ing the means of future salvation; we receive noth- 
ing but calumny, and are doomed to everlasting 
damnation. 'We have given you your religion,* we 
say to the Christians. ' That 's nothing,' they answer ; 
'it has not affeded us in the least.' And they prove 
it. They keep on baiting and persecuting and kill- 
ing their neighbours, not as themselves. What must 
we do? Get back our old home, though we have to 
pay for it. There, at least, will we find 'a crust of 
bread and a corner to sleep in.' 
" We must have a common cause, an objed of unity, 

i6 



Sometimes He is a Zionist 

a centre of gravity, in order to survive as a people, 
and this is what we can have in the proposed Jewish 
State. 

"And what an inspiring pidlure it will be of Israel, 
bruised and bleeding from the travail of his long, 
futile travels, at last straightening up his back and 
returning home to rebuild his national life and his 
temple in Palestine. There he will create an ideal re- 
public, fashioned after the teachings of the prophets 
and the lessons he has received from the teachers of 
the nations — a republic that will teach the world 
justice and righteousness. 'And from Zion shall 
issue the law, and the word of God shall go forth 
from Jerusalem,' and our poets to come shall sing 
new psalms to God on the banks of the Jordan, in 
the shades of Lebanon and in the beautiful gardens 
of Sharon and Carmel. I have never been there, and 
though I have gone through life without a geogra- 
phy, yet I seem to remember all these places. The 
grand, vigorous Hebrew language shall come to life 
again and we shall have a glorious literature of Is- 
rael's resurrection. Ah, how beautiful the vision 
that looms up as I contemplate these things ! And 
then — " 

Keidansky ceased speaking, paused, and asked for 
another glass of tea. 
"And then?" I asked. 

"Then," he continued, "the mood passes, the feel- 
ing alters, the pid:ure that a fleeting fancy has thrown 
upon the canvas of my view, fades, a change comes 

17 



Discourses of Keidansky 

over the spirit of my dream. I remember that I am no 
longer the pious little boy praying in the synagogue 
of Keidan, 'a year hence in Jerusalem/ The greater 
vision appears before me, the larger ideal comes 
back, and Keidansky is himself again. Sometimes I 
am a Zionist, but only sometimes. The rest of the 
time I am as strongly opposed to it as any of you, be- 
cause with all my imputed universalism I have great 
hopes for my people, and because I have marked out 
a greater role for Israel to play in the history of the 
future than being a mere little bee building a little 
hive in a tiny obscure corner of the globe." 
Here the medical student protested that a man can- 
not be both for and against an idea at the same time, 
that those who are not with us are wrong and against 
us, and that Keidansky is a "long distance off" — 
for he said," scientifically analyzed" — 
"Scientifically analyzed, you are a bore," Keidan- 
sky broke forth infuriated, " and don't interrupt me 
when I am solving problems and making history. 
Be consistent, boys, and do not ask me to be so. 
Give me, at least, the right that you grant to a char- 
adier in fi6lion, the right to be irrational, illogical, 
and, above all, superbly inconsistent. I am a char- 
acter in life and nothing is so fictitious. At times, I 
want to be with all, feel with all, believe with all, see 
the beauties of all ideals, and also point out the great 
fad: about them — that they are all fatal — and yet 
that to be without ideals is baneful and deadly. I 
cannot be partial, and that is why they expelled me 

i8 



Sometimes He is a Zionist 

from DeLeon's Socialist Labor party. Partiality is 
destructive to art, and I might have been an artist, 
if I had had the patience and self-abnegation and a 
lot of other requisites and things. 
" But to return to the larger vision, which eclipses 
the dreamlet of Zionism. The Jew must not be rele- 
gated to an obscure corner of the world, to a little 
platform whereupon he will recite a piece in an un- 
known tongue. I want a big stage for him — the 
world. I want a great play for him — all its multi- 
tudinous adlivities. For he is a wonderful aCtor. He 
has versatility, illusion, imagination and dramatic 
power. It is an inspiring part he plays in the world- 
drama. So let the play go on, and do not ask him to 
waste his energies and bargain with the Sultan for a 
bit of barren land that has been taken from him so 
long ago. He has a bigger task to perform, a larger 
mission to fulfil. 

" He must live among the nations and help them 
in their upward struggle for a higher civilization and 
a nobler life. If there are evils to be abolished he will 
help abolish them, and if there are dire problems, 
why, he has brains, which he loans more often than 
money. And this is the spectacle that I gloat over 
and glory in seeing : Israel among the nations, the 
saviour and the outcast, the redeemer and the re- 
jeded, the revered teacher and truant student, the 
honoured guest and persecuted resident, helping na- 
tions to make their histories, here and there, writ- 
ing great words in them, ministering to their arts 

19 



Discourses of Keidansky 

and helping to humanize humanity. To be perse- 
cuted and oppressed by the nations is inconvenient 
and annoying, but to make music, paint pictures, 
write books, sing songs, mould statues for them — 
how superb ! Ah, what a tragedy to be a Jew, and 
yet, how glorious ! The nations need the Jew and 
he must not desert them in their hour of need, and 
if he is true to his best self and keeps on growing he 
will not die and vanish as a people. In any case 't is 
nobler to die for a good cause than to live in impo- 
tence. So let the Jew remain, with whatever nation 
he abides, and as a good citizen help it grow great 
and good, and show that Ibsen was right when he 
called us the aristocracy of the race. Let not, I say 
to the Zionists, the Jew be like the little boy who 
runs away from school after he receives a thrashing 
and before he has taught his teacher a lesson. To 
sacrifice for Dr. Herzl's scheme our vast opportu- 
nities in the world, which owes us so much, and to 
which we are so indebted, would be selling our birth- 
right for a mess of pottage. So let us remain. We can 
do so much in so many countries with the teachings 
and spirit of Judaism. We, too, are frail and have 
many faults, but we can improve where there *s lots 
of room and plenty of opportunities. 
" Life is a melodrama, and in the latter ad:s the long- 
lost brothers, Jew and Christian, who have for so 
long waged war against each other, will recognize, 
understand each another, and perhaps, things will 
end happily, after all. 

20 



Sometimes He is a Zionist 

" Meanwhile we will forgive France for the Drey- 
fus affair, because of her perfedl prose and beautiful 
poetry. I will even forgive Captain Dreyfus for 
having been such a bore, if he will stop writing 
books. Let the Jews remain in Russia instead of 
going to Palestine, for think of the love of freedom 
that tyranny engenders ! Think how good all our 
oppressions have been in that they made us love 
liberty and truth. Think what a chance to shed 
blood for freedom there will yet be in Russia. Our 
people should remain there. Things are changing. 
What a fine literature it is producing, and how no- 
ble Russia is — underground. 
"Away with your petty neutral little State, I say 
to the Zionist; the State to be bought on the in- 
stalment plan from the Sultan, to be built on the 
soil of superstition, where the Jews will go back to 
their traditional customs and fall asleep. The land is 
barren and sterile, and I do not believe in starvation, 
even on holy land. Even the orthodox must have a 
religion ; but they will never acquire it in Palestine. 
They will cling to the old. They will not progress. 
The Bible — and I bow my head in reverence for 
that great work of fidion — will never be edited and 
revised as it ought to be, in Palestine. Judaism will 
not grow in Palestine. The Jews will cling to the 
letter, and the spirit of it will starve. God save the 
Jews from Palestine. Judaism there will not grow ; 
it will stagnate and die. The Jews must live among 
the destroying forces of civilization. It is only when 

21 



Discourses of Keidansky 

they outgrow their obnoxious superstitions and 
down-dragging traditions that they become great." 
The speaker waxed warm ; his eyes flashed with en- 
thusiasm, his voice grew loud. 
" I want none of the Jewish State/* he said. " The 
whole world is holy land. Wherever there are good, 
honest people is holy land, and from every corner 
of the earth shall issue the law, and the word of God 
shall go forth from every place, including my garret. 
Give us a big stage, give us the world, give us the 
universe, and let me watch it from its centre — my 
garret at 3 Birmingham Alley; let me watch the 
great and glorious play with Israel's heroic part in 
all the adivities and growth and progress of the 
world, and I will 'thank whatever gods there be/ 
And this is my larger dream ; a better, more humane 
world, created by the brotherhood of men, with Is- 
rael as peacemaker and fraternizer. Amen." 



22 



IV 

Art for Tolstoy's Sake 

IT was at one of a series of ledlures given under 
the auspices of the Social Science Circle during 
the winter season. The audience which assem- 
bled in the gloomy little hall on the third floor of 
an East Broadway building was rather small in size. 
In announcing the ledlure no rewards had been of- 
fered to those who would come to listen to it, as 
often seemed necessary ; the speaker of the evening 
was only a member of the club, who worked for his 
ideas, and not an eminent ledturer who lived on his 
reputation and whose name would " draw a crowd." 
The majority of young men and women of the 
Ghetto would not think of wasting an evening on 
wisdom; they would commit no such folly, when 
they could have " such a lovely time " at the near-by 
dancing schools. Still, the few and the faithful were 
all present, and those who were thirsting for knowl- 
edge came to be saturated. Max Lubinsky was the 
speaker, and his theme," Tolstoy's Theory of Art," 
was teeming with vital import. 
Keidansky, as a member of the committee in charge 
of the literary work of the circle, adted as chairman 
of the meeting. In introducing the speaker he made 
a few remarks, somewhat as follows : 
" Tolstoy has theories of art. Personally I am rather 
sorry for this, because if he did not have them he 

23 



Discourses of Keidansky 

would be a greater artist. Even as theories of life 
often mar existence, so theories of art impair the 
artist. Admitting that art with a purpose can help 
the world, it is certain that art for its own sweet sake 
can create and re-create worlds. After he had con- 
tributed some of the greatest works of art to the liter- 
ature of Russia, Tolstoy decided to find out just what 
artwas. During his investigations, whichlastedmany 
years, he found that the art of the world was in great 
part lazy, unemployed, corrupt, suffering from en- 
nui, and ministering to the debauched, poor rich 
people, whom the poor man ever envies ; he decided 
that art should become useful and go to work, and 
he gave it an employment — the promulgation of 
his ideas of social regeneration. 
" O nee, Tolstoy tells us, art was primitive and simple 
and pious, and it was good art and true ; but during 
the Middle Ages, when the upper class and the no- 
bility became sceptical and pessimistic, and could 
find no more consolation in religion, art became di- 
vorced from the church, because they took it up as 
an amusement and study. And ever since art got into 
such bad company — among people of culture and 
those who understand it, who cherished all its won- 
derful enfoldments and caressed all its capricious 
moods — ever since art got into such bad company, 
it became as beautiful as sin, and so complex, mystic 
and ambiguous that even the Russian muzhik or peas- 
ant cannot understand it. And so — as it seems to 
me — argues Tolstoy, the fad: that the muzhik cannot 

24 



Art for Tolstoy s Sake 

appreciate 'Tannhauser' proves conclusively that 
Wagner never wrote any real music. Then, the dear 
old master delves deeply into all definitions, origins 
and explanations of art. He finds no designation, 
no description that satisfies him; they all hinge on 
and culminate in beauty — in the production and re- 
production of beauty that is in life, in nature, in the 
worlds within us and without ; and Tolstoy is rather 
shy at mere beauty, and thinks it a temptress, a siren 
and a song ; besides, beauty, he says, changes and 
depends on taste, and taste varies, and as all these 
definitions are too far-fetched and vague, he finds 
one that is still more indefinite. Art is the communi- 
cation of feeling, the expression of the religious 
consciousness. Of course it is that, but first and 
foremost it must have the sterling qualities of art 
in form and matter. 

"Tolstoy, however, would make this the chief basis 
and standard of art, for his would be an art that 
would detract men's minds from mere beauty, that 
would make them helplessly pious, that would unite 
mankind, make life as monotonous as possible, and 
convert humanity to Christian Anarchism. 
" Every book, picture, statue and composition of 
music should be degradingly moral. And the ques- 
tion arises, what does he mean by religious con- 
sciousness? Walt Whitman expressed his religious 
consciousness in a manner that shocked the world, 
and it is notat all pleasing to Tolstoy, and yet Whit- 
man was the most religious man that lived in cen- 

25 



Discourses of Keidansky 

turies. The Abbe Prevost wrote " Manon Lescaut " 
to express his rehglous consciousness, and Robert 
Ingersoll dehvered his led:ures to do the same; to 
express their rehgious consciousness, great sculptors 
mould nude figures of women, out of worship of the 
divine beauty of the human form; and St. Francis of 
Assisi expresses the spiritual emotion in quite a dif- 
ferent manner. But no, Tolstoy has a certain kind of 
religious consciousness in mind, and this should be 
expressed by all art and all artists in a uniform mode 
until we have gone back to primitive conditions. 
" I yield to no one in my admiration of the grand 
old man of Russia. He is one of the noblest souls 
that ever walked this earth, and as an artist, when he 
is at his best and does not preach, he is superb; there 
are few like him. But when he begins to philoso- 
phize and moralize, few can rise to the height of ab- 
surdity as quickly as he can. As it seems to me, 
Tolstoy^s position is something like this: 
"^Christianity is a colossal failure,' he says, 'so let 
us all become Christians. Our civilization is dread- 
fully slow in its advance ; it has not as yet outgrown 
its barbaric primitiveness, so let us all go back to 
barbarism. All government is evil, so let us be gov- 
erned solely by the teachings of a man who lived 
nearly two thousand years ago, a man who was pure 
and who made no study of the wicked conditions of 
our time. It is only thus that we can become free — 
by a circumlocutory process of self-abnegation, self- 
sacrifice and self-annihilation. Let us become slaves 

26 



Art for Tolstoy s Sake 

of the theory of minding our neighbors' business and 
we will be free. The power of will is the greatest 
thing in the world ; he who follows his free will be- 
comes a slave and is doomed to damnation. Let us 
be ourselves ; let us stifle our feelings, become al- 
truists and get away from ourselves. All govern- 
ment is tyranny; let us abolish all government, 
adopt a rigid, ancient, mystic morality, and let every- 
one become his own tyrant. Our morality is a failure ; 
it has produced a false art ; therefore we must have 
a true art which will promulgate our morality. Art 
that exists for mere beauty cannot be understood by 
the great masses, therefore let us have an art for the 
masses which will be beautiful. Our Christianity is 
a failure, therefore we must convert art to Christi- 
anity and send it forth as a missionary of the Gos- 
pels as I interpret them.' This, as I see it, is the 
queer position of Tolstoy, but his theories are ex- 
ceedingly well-meant and highly interesting, and I 
am glad that we are to have a ledure this evening 
onTolstoy's theories of art by one who is a thorough 
student of Tolstoy and to whom the master's teach- 
ings are near and dear. 

" I must not forget that I am not the speaker of the 
evening ; I merely wanted to hint at the importance 
of the subjed so that you may give it due attention, 
but I must not transgress upon the time of the lec- 
turer, for the way of the transgressor, according to 
Tolstoy and others, is said to be hard. Besides, the 
chairman is not supposed to have any opinions ; his 

27 



Discourses of Keidanshy 

duty is only to eulogize the speaker — in a merci- 
less manner — and to introduce him with a few ap- 
propriate, well-chosen and ill-fated remarks. The 
chairman at best is only a relic of barbarism, and 
should be abolished.'* 

And Keidansky at last introduced the speaker, his 
friend. Max Lubinsky, who, after treating his audi- 
ence to a bit of satire at the expense of "the elo- 
quent and loquacious chairman," proceeded to give 
a simple, sympathetic and modest interpretation of 
Tolstoy's "What is Art?" illustrating his talk with 
copious reading from the book, and now and then 
referring to his written notes. It was a comprehen- 
sive review of Tolstoy's book he gave, and as to his 
own ideas on art he did not sufficiently differ from 
Tolstoy to have a formidable opinion on the matter, 
and he had too much reverencefor the great Russian 
to voice it just then. The presiding officer did not 
close the meeting without again remarking that " art 
with a purpose is art with an impediment," and that 
" the only excuse of art is its uselessness." From 
what I overheard after the meeting I observed that 
there was a strong anti-Keidansky feehng in the 
gathering. He had evidently gone too far,had voiced 
his notions too freely, and had no right to take up 
so much time in speaking. Besides, most of those 
present were social reformers, tremendously in 
earnest, and they felt, more or less, that Tolstoy 
was right; that art was only great as an advocate. 
As we were walking together, homeward bound, a 

28 



Art for T^olstoy s Sake 

little later, I said : " My dear fellow, you 've got 
yourself into trouble. They are all up in arms 
against you and your awful heresies. You have al- 
most delivered the lecture of the evening yourself, 
and the circle won't stand for it. Next thing you 
know you'll be court-martialed." 
" I almost exped:ed that this would happen,'' said 
Keidansky, " but I had to say what I did. It was an 
imperative duty. I am only sorry that I forgot a few 
more things I had on my mind to say. Audiences 
confuse me and make me forget my best points. I 
suppose they will call a special meeting and pass 
resolutions to condemn me and my proceedings. 
But this will only prove the superiority of individ- 
uals over society. Before a society can pass resolu- 
tions, the individual adls. I suppose they'll say lots 
of things now. They will say I was trying to make 
epigrams. Epigrams are always hateful — to those 
who cannot make a point in a volume. They will say 
I was uttering platitudes. After you convince people 
that there are such things as platitudes in the world, 
they begin to find them in everything you say. I 
once had an uncle (he is still living, only he is very 
rich, and so I disowned him), and at one time I ex- 
plained to him the theory of our moving along the 
lines of least resistance. A short while after that we 
had a very intimate interview and my uncle told me 
that I was a lazy, good-for-nothing visionary; that 
I did not want to do anything, and moved along the 
lines of least resistance. 

29 



Discourses of Keidansky 

" I had to say what I did because I did not want the 
people to go off with such crude and false concep- 
tions of art. I knew that Lubinsky would not dare 
to differ from Tolstoy. He adores the old man. So 
do I, but I cannot afford to give up my mind to any 
one — not until I become a resped:able member of 
the synagogue, and join a number of secret orders. 
Then it does not matter. The worst thing about a 
charming, noble personality is that our admiration 
for it gets the better of our reasoning power and we 
become ready to follow it in all its follies. This is the 
regrettable influence that Tolstoy has exerted upon 
Lubinsky. Thus our emancipators enslave us. *Be 
yourself,' says Emerson, and you become an Emer- 
sonian. 

" But there is something else I wanted to say on this 
question of art. We Jews anticipated and lived in 
perfed: accord with Tolstoy's theory of art — that 
art must be religious and must be burdened with a 
message, or a purpose — and the result is that we 
have no fine arts of our own, except poetry, which 
has more sighs and sobs and tears and piety than 
music and beauty. Of course, the reason for the ab- 
sence of art among us is one of the commandments, 
which forbids the making of images, and oh,Icannot 
tell you how sorry I am that this commandment was 
ever observed. I do not objed: so much to the other 
nine commandments, but for this one I can never for- 
give my people. And here, by the way, is an example 
of what the religious consciousness can do for art. 

30 



Art for "Tolstoy s Sake 

"There is a religious consciousness which makes 
people unconscious of religion. *The piety of art is 
the quest of the unattainable/ and the more freedom 
you give it from missions the greater the mission it 
will fulfil. One more answer to the theory of art for 
Tolstoy's sake: Here is a fable that occurred to me 
as I was listening to the ledure. I have no time to 
elaborate and polish it, but I give you the right to 
plagiarize it. 

"'You must pardon me/ said Art to Beauty, one 
day, 'if I do not pay so much attention to you as I 
used to, but this is a world of evils and problems, 
and I will have to leave you for awhile and go forth 
and help to make a better, juster system of so- 
ciety.' And Art went forth to fight the battle of the 
poor and the oppressed, and Beauty waited wistfully 
for its return, alone and deserted,withered and faded. 
After many years Beauty went in quest of her lost 
lover. Art, who had not returned, and she came upon 
a field of battle, and there, transformed into rebel 
warrior, was her lost lover. Art. And even as she 
gazed, a shot was fired from the enemy, and it pierced 
the heart of Art, and he lay prostrate and dead be- 
fore her." 



31 



V 

'^ Three Stages of the Game'' 

WE had been speaking of " the only law that 
never changes " — the law of change: of 
the glorious ascent of the youthful non- 
conformist, and of the sad descent of the older and 
wiser compromiser — a theme, by the way, as old as 
age and yet as new as youth. We all had friends we 
once looked up to and now looked down upon, and 
we indulged in a few reminiscences. Every army had 
its deserters, every cause its traitors, and the cru- 
saders who carried the red flag also changed their 
minds, lost heart and ran home. 
"Oh, the flesh-pots of Egypt. Even the vegeta- 
rians cannot forget them," remarked my compan- 
ion. " They who led the strikes among the sweat- 
shop workers in the course of time became heartless 
capitalist bosses; and there were Anarchists, who 
wanted to abolish all laws, who became lawyers and 
went into politics. One by one many of the promis- 
ing young men of the Ghetto broke their promises 
and left the uplifting movements they brought into 
existence. Some died, some married for love of 
money, some took wives unto themselves, some be- 
came lawyers and dodlors, some dentists, some wire- 
pullers, some went into politics, and some moved 
to Brooklyn. Compromise? They all hated that 
word and then — they compromised. 

33 



Discourses of Keidansky 

" Recently I have been thinking of three particular 
stages of the game — this grim and gruesome little 
game called Hfe," said Keidansky. "The first is 
when we sternly demand the truth, the second 
when we ask for justice, and the third — when we 
beg for mercy — 

" There you are with your eternal questions. It was 
Zolotkoffwho once called the Jew, bent and bowed 
by his sorrows and fearful of the future — it was he 
who called the Jew a living interrogation point. You 
just reminded me of the simile. But no ; I cannot 
tell you at which of the three stages I have arrived. 
I am at all and at none. What I really want I never 
ask for, because I hardly know what it is, and can- 
not formulate the demand. If I knew just what they 
were, perhaps I would n't want these things. Yet 
sometimes I think if I could play, if I could play 
the violin, I would express these starved longings 
and stifled yearnings. I could not only tell, but in 
the expression perhaps find what I want. In words 
I cannot do it; they are so formal, definite, rough. 
The other day my friend, the violinist, came and 
played for me. ' I '11 tell you a story,' he said, and he 
took his violin and played — a beautiful, thrilling 
story. The Unknowable was revealed for a moment ; 
and it occurred to me then that if I could play, I, 
too, might perform the miracle of expression, which 
proves the divinity of music. As it is, I cannot tell 
my desires; and yet I want but little here below 
and I don't want anything up above — " 

34 



''Three Stages of the Game'' 

" You don't mean to renounce your part of the 
world to come?" I asked. 

" I don't know that it is coming to me," said Kei- 
dansky. " Besides I am a little bit 'shy ' on the world 
to come. I am afraid it is fashioned too much on the 
style of this one, and down here, you know, I am 
sometimes tired of everything. The entire pano- 
rama is so farcical, the whole game so monotonous, 
and our heroics are so ludicrous. The valetudina- 
rians make me sick. I am weary of ' The Book of 
Jade,' and clever people are awful bores. Yes, I 
am somewhat afraid of the second story they call 
the other world, for it may really come, and history 
might repeat itself, even up there. 
"The mortal fear of oblivion makes one crave for 
immortality; but, perhaps, one life is enough. No 
matter how sinful, or how saintly, a human being 
has been, one world is sufficient of a punishment. 
Virtue is its only reward; evil is its own punish- 
ment. The life beyond — is beyond. Let it stay 
there. 

"Promises of Heaven and threats of the Midway 
do not move me so much now, for the chances are 
that they are one and the same thing, and this is the 
only place we are sure of and ought to make the 
most of. There is some good down here in spite of 
the reformers. The good is right beside the evil, and 
we can seldom tell the difference. The saint and the 
sinner often exchange pulpits and each proves the 
imperfedion of the other. Paradise is right next 

35 



Discourses of Keidansky 

door to Purgatory ; in fad:, you want to be careful 
when you are around that way lest you enter the 
place you weren*t sent to. We ought to make the 
most of it, I say, and I know I am right, because 
I have been condemned by a number of orthodox 
rabbis." 

"You contradid: yourself," I said. 
"I do it to be consistent," said Keidansky. 
" But I have digressed and transgressed, and all 
because of your useless question. As I was saying, 
when we are young, ignorant, innocent and inex- 
perienced, we sternly demand the truth, the whole 
truth, and nothing but the truth. We come to en- 
lighten this dominion of darkness, to right a world 
gone wrong and to guide a poor and deluded man- 
kind to the eternal verities. Iconoclasticism becomes 
our creed, infidelity our religion. We are to repeal 
the world's laws, to shatter its idols, to demolish its 
traditions, and we at once reje6t its standards and 
ideals because they are not founded on truth. 
" We question, investigate, analyze, and the imag- 
ination of youth works wonders. We are all gods 
in our dreams. The re-creation of the world is but 
an easy task. With all the modern improvements, 
it can be done in less than seven days, it seems. 
Glorious quest of truth and the golden goal, en- 
chanting castles in the air, of which youth is the 
architect ! Have you ever been young? I was born 
old, yet I know something about it. And for the 
rest, you know what happens. Most of the things in 

36 



''Three Stages of the Game''' 

the world end sadly, because in the ending of a 
thing there is sadness. We find, at last, that what we 
wanted cannot be had for the asking ; that we must 
pay for it with our lives ; that the truth is — there is 
no truth — that as much of it as we find is often 
more than we want; that illusion is a necessary ele- 
ment in the composition of the world; that every- 
thing is relative and the quest of truth is a relative 
virtue. I hate the compromiser and deserter and I 
have nothing to say in their defence, but change is 
in the very nature of things, and sooner or later we 
must recognize that absolute truth does not exist, 
and we must accept the old foundation for building 
whatever we can in the world, and realize that per- 
fection is a long and laborious process of becoming. 
" Later on we really see that all is for the best, that 
the pessimists are here as an objed: lesson, and we 
conclude that it is folly to be too wise. We cannot 
repeal the world's laws all at once, but we can break 
them gradually. There is much wisdom in folly and 
some truth in falsehood, too. The stupidity of the 
world is an absolute necessity : the world's work has 
to be done. So, at least, we decide, and we abandon 
the impossible quest after the absolute truth and 
become satisfied with justice, mere justice. We only 
ask for fair play. At this stage of the game we are 
already hardened and inured to things, and we man- 
age to get along with justice, such as it is when we 
get it or buy it in court. At this time, if we are pros- 
perous, we read and relish Omar Khayyam, the 

37 



Discourses of Keidansky 

philosophy of whom is well expressed by the street 
urchin when he says, ' I don't give a hang.' And we 
also laugh at the poor fools who seek after the truth. 
Later on still, when we grow weary and weak and 
cannot have justice — are not crafty or strong 
enough — we come down a little lower and beg for 
mercy. Thus we reach the third stage of the game." 
The speaker paused for a moment, watching a little 
boy who was trying to float his little boat on the 
pond — for we were lucubrating in the Park, where 
we met by accident. 

"That 's all very well," I said, " but what have you 
to suggest.^" 

"Why, nothing that would make a sensation in a 
newspaper," he said, " but something that by chance 
or miracle may have some reason in it. It is this : Let 
the youth continue his noble, heroic, if melodra- 
matic, quest of truth, that those who grow wiser and 
weaker may get justice. Let the young strive for the 
impossible and the possible will be attained, and 
those who ask for justice will really have it. Let 
them question and analyze and shatter idols and 
become bombastic and hysterical and build castles, 
and dream and disturb the order of the world — and 
let us admire their heilige dumheit — that some day 
those who have grown feeble may find at least fair 
play. The more the world will tolerate the extrava- 
gances of youthjthe more it will benefit by its achieve- 
ments. Let the wildest imaginations have free play 
and things will grow fairer and more fair. Let them 

38 



''Three Stages of the Game'^ 

dream. To be disillusioned is a trifle; but never to 
have dreamed is terrible. Finally, this earth will be 
turned into a heaven by all those who have failed to 
do it. 

"And those who have grown older and sadder and 
merely ask for justice, let them really demand it 
with all their might, and so shall their efforts not be 
in vain, and so shall those who beg for mercy receive 
it — or none beg for mercy. If those who ask for 
justice would only be just to those who are in the 
other stages of the game, and if those who beg for 
mercy would only be merciful ! No matter at what 
stage, let all play fairly and honestly and be tolerant 
of others, and all things will tend towards ultimate 
decency. Again, were there more demanding truth, 
there would be fewer satisfied with mere justice, and 
none would beg for mercy. At any rate, more truth, 
more justice; more justice, more mercy, or no need 
of it at all. If only every one would want something, 
mean something, <3^^ something. Personally I cannot 
do very much, for you see I am somewhat of a 
preacher myself. Going on the ' elevated,' are you ? 
Sorry for you. Good-bye.'* 



39 



VI 

*' The Badness of a Good Man '' 

I WAS looking for Keidansky, but he was no- 
where to be found. He was not at home, and my 
visits to a few of his favorite resorts were also in 
vain. Then they told me over at Schur's bookshop 
on Canal street, that there was an entertainment be- 
ing given by the Alliance on that evening, and Kei- 
dansky was to contribute an essay to the literary 
programme, a paper on " The Badness of a Good 
Man." "It serves them right," I said, and I forth- 
with betook myself to the dreary quarters of the Al- 
liance, which formed the intelledtual centre of our 
Ghetto. The exercises were already in progress. The 
hall was packed ; hardly any standing-room left. 
The pictures of Karl Marx and Michael Bakounin 
— the respective fathers of Socialism and Anarchism 
— looked down upon a pious and picturesque con- 
gregation of people who swore by their names ; the 
same studious, serious, troubled, yet occasionally 
smiling faces of young men and young women of the 
Jewish quarter — seekers after light among the peo- 
ple that walk in darkness. The hall was brightly il- 
luminated. The people were in their best. It was 
Sunday evening. Even Keidansky had condescend- 
ed, or compromised, and paid some attention to 
"external appearances," this time. He brushed his 
clothes "for the occasion," as he once remarked. At 

41 



Discourses of Keidansky 

any rate, there was some change in his attire differ- 
ing from his usual negHgent appearance. This was 
an entertainment. There were several readings and 
they were all teeming with trouble, and propt with 
problems. The recitations, well given by several 
young women, were compositions like Hood's 
"Song of the Shirt," William Morris's Socialist 
chants; the songs of suffering and joyless toil, sung 
in Yiddish, were by Edelstatt, Rosenfeld and Gold- 
stein. The people over here enjoy their sorrows, it 
seems. 

Keidansky was already on the platform when I came 
in; in fad:, he was already reading his paper. His 
paper was a typical utterance of the iconoclast that 
he is, and craving the indulgence of the reader, I 
quote here as much of it as I copied then and there, 
ere we come to the conversation. I do not know what 
he said before I entered, but after that he hastily and 
nervously read somewhat as follows : 
" He is a good man and a worthy, and a useful mem- 
ber of society. All his neighbors say so, and he stands 
well in the entire community. His friends are legion. 
He is always ready to do them a good turn, and they 
are in turn ever ready to reciprocate. He lives, ad:s, 
thinks and speaks like all other good men; and he is 
exceedingly popular and highly respefted. He is tol- 
erant. He agrees with everybody on almost every 
conceivable subjedl. He is a good man. This is a free 
country, and every man has a right to his honest 
opinion — provided he is not a crank, or eccentric, 

42 



''The Badness of a Good Man'' 

and does not make himself obnoxious by differing 
with everybody. In that case, of course, the man is 
beyond recovery; he is lost to all shame and to the 
good old political parties and principles. 
"He respeds every honest opinion and sentiment, 
and when he does meet a man who differs from him, 
why, he gently and adroitly changes the subjed: and 
smiles irresistibly and talks pleasantly, anyway. Oh, 
well, we are bound to differ on some things — but 
what is the difference so long as we both vote the 
same ticket? Have a cigar? When the man does not 
vote the same ticket it is really too bad, you know; 
but there is still a smile and a pleasant word. 
"His generous contributions to the charities of the 
city are well known. The newspapers frequently 
have paragraphs in praise of his philanthropic deeds. 
The press is one of our greatest institutions. It is 
the palladium of our liberties, and a great medium 
of advertising. There are always good words, cigars 
and drinks for the newspaper ' boys.' They are a lot 
of fine, clever, noble fellows — according to the 
press, and he believes it. He is a good man. 
" He travels through life in the good old-fashioned 
way. He is guided by the morality of our common 
ancestors, abides by their time-honored customs and 
reveres their sacred traditions. He thinks as his 
fathers thought, whose fathers thought as their 
fathers thought, and whose fathers — never thought 
anything. He is a good man, and he is agreeable. 
He once almost agreed with a Christian Scientist — 

43 



Discourses of Keidanshy 

he sold him a parcel of property. Christian Scientists 
have faith. It is good to do business with people who 
have faith. There is always much truth in what other 
people tell him, only we are bound to differ on some 
things, as he always says. 

" He is a patriot and his lungs are ever at the service 
of his country. It is my country, whatever it does or 
does not do. Let us give three cheers for the stars and 
stripes, and hang the social reformers. The people 
are always right and they know it. He believes in the 
people, and they have faith in him. They have al- 
ready sent him to the Board of Aldermen, and there 
are many other places they may send him to. There 
is a Congress at Washington, and many good men 
aresentthere. He is persistently honest. His honesty 
has been brought to the notice of many. ' Honesty is 
the best policy ' is a line ever on his lips. His reputa- 
tion for veracity is enviable. It pays to tell the truth, 
he says. He tells the truth as he sees it, and he sees 
it as everybody else does. 

" He is the most active member of the largest con- 
gregation in his district, and is considered a strong 
pillar of the church — even of society at large. He 
gives aid and succour to the weak and the failures ; but 
he is always on the side of the strong and the success- 
ful. It is the largest movement in his community, so- 
cial, political, or religious, that receives his staunch 
support. And it so happens that he is ever in accord 
with the tendencies of the largest movement. 
"He is a good man. He is eminently pradlical, and 

44 



''The Badness of a Good Man''' 

he harbors a horror for visionaries and their Utopias. 
He loathes agitators and rebels, disturbers of peace 
and order. Peace, order, accuracy, submission, obe- 
dience, duty — and uniformity is a good word, too. 
Children, you must always abide by the powers that 
be, and obey your parents ; they know better what is 
best for you. They have buried many children. Gen- 
tlemen, respedl the flag. This is a free country, and 
the Government can do as it pleases with the people. 
"Vague, unexpressed longings of a new time, hun- 
gry desires of the age, wistful heart-whispers for a 
freer, higher life, muffled music of far-offseas, stifled 
and half-drowned voices of the submerged Ego cry- 
ing 'I ' — these do not disturb his dreams. He has 
no dreams. Far be it from him to be touched by the 
shapeless, new-born aspirations which are suspended 
in the air waiting for some one to give them form. 
He is a man of fads, and lends no credence to far- 
away fictions. His health is so good that he is not 
easily aflFedted by theories and books. 
"He is consistent and hardly ever changes his mind; 
at least not more often than do those who draw up the 
platform of his political party. His intrepid loyalty 
to his party cannot be forgotten as long as he lives ; 
he stands as solidly within its ranks as a mortared- 
in brick within a wall.When he says a thing it is said, 
and he keeps every promise he makes, good or bad. 
He prizes highly and is keenly jealous of his repu- 
tation, and believes in living up to it. He will not dif- 
fer from you on matters of art or literature, because, 

45 



Discourses of Keidansky 

well, because, as he says, he is not well up in these 
things, and besides, it is all a matter of taste, is it not? 
But he likes agood old-fashioned melodrama ; don't 
you? 

"He is a good man. Fathers point him out to their 
sons as a paragon of virtue. He never swerves nor 
deviates from the path of duty and righteousness, as 
he sees it. He is indissolubly linked in the great chain 
of real, pradical, daily events of the world, and he 
never chases any phantoms — not he. He never 
fights with fate. He takes things as they come, and 
many things come his way. Providence seems to be 
on his side. He never complains of the powers that 
be in heaven or on earth. God made the world, and 
no man can ever change it. All that is, is well for the 
industrious and the successful. There is always room 
on the top for those who can crawl up. He adapts 
himself to all circumstances, and profits by most of 
them. He moves along the lines of least resistance; 
is ever drifting into his proper niche. He will 'get 
there.' Where he cannot be aggressive, he is agree- 
able, and usually gains his end. He never falters, nor 
fails to fall in line with the rest. It is always safest to 
be on the safe side. H e positively believes in the bene- 
fits that accrue to those who are negative. 
" He possesses all the negative virtues of his honored 
ancestors, who now slumber beneath their eulogisti- 
cally inscribed tombstones. He meekly follows their 
present example of abstaining from most of the vi- 
cious pleasures of life. He is a good and respedable 

46 



"The Badness of a Good Man'' 

man, and he never lets his desires run loose; they 
must abide by certain laws. 

" He is deeply interested in all matters concerning 
public improvements. Why ? The motive of a man's 
interest in public affairs is often a private matter ; but 
the impeccable reputation of a good man should be 
a sufficient shield against the scrutiny of the inquisi- 
tive. The inquisitive will never go to heaven, and 
they will 'get it' here on earth. 
"He is modest. He frequently complains of the 
credit and the honors that are given him by the 
community — lest his hearers should not know that 
ke bears the burden of demonstrative public ad- 
miration. He is profusely grateful for all he receives, 
which, he constantly protests, is so much more than 
he deserves. He only tries to do his duty in his 
humble way. He is effusively cordial and friendly. 
He has a pervasive, confidence-inspiring smile for 
all who pass him, known or unknown. He clasps 
your hand firmly and shakes it long. He is con- 
genial even to the congealing. 

" He is a self-made, self-advertised man. He has af- 
fluence ; he has influence. His exemplary character is 
worthy of emulation, as the newspaper and his politi- 
cal friends say; and his emoluments are not few nor 
far between. He is intensely, surprisingly religious. 
The creed of his fathers is good enough for him. He 
questions not, nor doubts — not he. A good, devoted 
churchman, he is a regular attendant; and he never 
sleeps nor slumbers, no matter how long and how 

47 



Discourses of Keidansky 

old the sermon be. He is a brave man. The good 
souls of his distrid: are most lavish in praise of his 
piety. 

"Alas, it is not possible to enumerate all his splen- 
did deeds, his high-classed qualities and his standard 
virtues. But, then, that is hardly necessary. They 
speak for themselves, or for their owner. He is a 
good husband and father, and his word is law unto 
his wife and children. He is an excellent citizen, a 
loud-mouthed patriot. He is a good man. He is go- 
ing to heaven. And, oh, I do wish he would go there 
soon! 

After I had listened to this scandalous screed and 
other sombre and shadowy things that were on the 
programme of the entertainment, I finally overtook 
the ofFender,and shook hands with Keidansky."! 've 
been looking for you," I explained, "and they told 
me you would be here, so I came, and caught you in 
the ad:.** 

"Glad you showed up,** he said; "but I am rather 
afraid. Do be lenient. I cannot defend nor explain 
everything.** 

"Well,** I began, leniently, "according to this ha- 
rangue of yours, we would have to change our con- 
ception of goodness and morality, and — ** 
"No, we don*t have to,** he answered impatiently; 
"but we can*t help it; it is always, always changing. 
The good man of one age is the dead man of an- 
other. Between vice and virtue there is often no more 
than a change of mind. Goodness is only a point of 

48 



''The Badness of a Good Man'''' 

view, and morality ceases to be moral after awhile. 
What *s a good thing to do to-day will, in all prob- 
ability, be the best thing to avoid to-morrow. It 's all 
a question of time ; no standard stands forever. Why, 
the coat of tar and feathers is going out of fashion, 
and even in New England, it *s no longer a crime to 
be happy. Morality is but an arbitrary agreement, 
subjedl to change. It is a catalogue of certain accept- 
ed virtues, which should be edited, revised, and re- 
printed, from time to time; for many of the articles 
in this booklet go out of fashion, and otherwise be- 
come stale, obsolete, and even obnoxious. At best, 
the goods are not what they are represented to be by 
the drummers, that is, the preachers, when it comes 
to their delivery — when it comes down or up to real 
life. What do you think of virtues that consist either 
of doing nothing, or of doing things for no other rea- 
son than that they have bored other people to death. 
The catalogue is full of them, and just now we have 
come to a time when our current conventional mo- 
rality is a kind of mortality — dead and deadening. It 
holds us down to outworn, oppressive systems, cus- 
toms, regulations, and the uniformity of things is 
stifling. 

"It prevents growth, it impedes progress. We can- 
not live as free, untrammelled individuals. We must 
be citizens, members of society; we must be what 
other people call respedlable. 
" Everybody owns everybody else. Everybody fol- 
lows, no one leads his own life. No one has any in- 

49 



Discourses of Keidansky 

itiative. Everybody examines your moral condu6t, 
and dictates the term of your existence. How can one 
have a religion, if he must live up to the faith of 
everybody else? How can we live if we must follow 
the dull and noble examples of those who are dead 
and never knew any better? Everybody listens to 
what the people say, and no one hears his own voice. 
This is an age of machinery. There are no more in- 
dividuals ; there are automatic walking and work- 
ing machines which have been wound up by public 
opinion to run so many hours according to a well-ap- 
proved system of regulations. 'What's the use of 
common-sense?' says a character in one of Jacob 
Gordin's plays. 'What's the use of common-sense 
when we have a Constitution?' Thousands of fools 
are kneeling before the fetish of public opinion. 
'What will the people say?' they all ask. Nothing, 
I say, nothing.The people never say anything.They 
only talk. Individuals say it all. Those who depend 
upon others, who see strength in union are weak- 
lings. United we fall, divided we stand. Those who 
dare to tread in the path of freedom, who dare to do 
things and say things, who own their bodies and 
never raise any mortgages on their souls, who make 
their own morality — they are the people who ad- 
vance the world's progress and help to civilize our 
civilization. They have nearly always been called bad 
by their contemptible contemporaries — yet they 
represented all the goodness worth having. God 
give us the men who have virtue enough to do as 

5° 



''The Badness of a Good Man'''' 

they please, and courage enough to shock their 
neighbors. 

"But it's all system and monotony and imitation 
with the majorities, and a lot of slavish, knavish, 
puny and pious little beings, afraid of their own 
voices and not daring to draw their breath any more 
often than their neighbors do, and with whom mo- 
rality and sanity is a matter ofmajority rule — beings 
like these are called the good people. 
"This idea must be reversed.We must come to real- 
ize the utter badness of the conventional, crawling, 
yours-truly-for-a-consideration, good people. Also 
we must come to realize the supreme goodness of 
so-called bad people — people who are too religious 
to go to church — to whom tyranny of any kind is 
the height of immorality, and slavery the depth of it. 
We must have more bad people to save this wicked 
world. And heaven save us from most of the good 
people of to-day. 

" It is one of those ' dumb-driven cattle ' that I tried 
to pay my respeds to in my paper — one of those 
cattle that here in democratic America become lead- 
ers of men. They do not know that the progress of 
the world has been built upon discarded customs 
and broken laws — but let us go down the street. I 
must have a drink of something before I can solve 
the problem to your satisfadion — or even convince 
myself that I am right." 



51 



VII 

" The Goodness of a Bad Man " 

PERHAPS it was to the disgrace of the AlH- 
ance that Keidansky's disquisition, his merci- 
less tirade against the good man, was received 
with some show of hand-clapping favor; and it may 
be to the credit of the membership that there were 
those in the audience who were surprised, shocked 
and startled, who dissented from and resented his 
utterances. At any rate, the dissenters and commen- 
tators stirred up a discussion, and for several days 
after that it was a topic of conversation and disagree- 
ment at the club, at the cafes and such places where 
our circles would congregate. Those who dissented 
and disagreed with the man who questioned the very 
bases of our morality said many, varying things and 
not all things were said in Keidansky's presence. And 
he? Sometimes he would say a word in explanation, 
or his defence, and for the rest he listened, looked 
wise, smiled and relished every attack made against 
him. His opponents finally agreed that his was a 
one-sided, partial view, and they told him that, after 
all, it was better to have a good man than a bad one. 
" But it yet remains to be proved," he argued, " that 
the average good man is not a whole lot worse than 
the so-called bad man.'* 

They all dared him to prove it, to present the other 
side of the case, the goodness of the bad man. " I 

53 



Discourses of Keidanshy 

don't care to prove anything," said Keidansky. 
" * Even the truth can be proved/ " he quoted a fa- 
vorite decadent; " but if you want me to, I '11 try to 
show you the other side of the story, as it seems to 
me." I '11 write it to-night or to-morrow, and read it to 
you all, say, on the evening of the day after to-mor- 
row, at the Alliance." We all agreed to be there, and 
accordingly assembled at the appointed time, and 
waited until Keidansky appeared with a folded man- 
uscript sticking out of his coat pocket. He was all out 
of breath. He had been walking very fast so as to get 
here "just in time to be late." He had just finished 
his composition. " My lamp went out last night," he 
explained, "and so I had to do it all this afternoon, 
and justgot through." And so here is his paper as he 
read it to us on "The Goodness of a Bad Man." 
" He is a bad man, a worthless, useless member of 
society. Most of his neighbors say so, and he does 
not stand well in the community. His friends are 
few, with long distances between. He would not go 
far out of his way to do a fellow a good turn ; does 
not believe in favours, he says, and nobody cares 
much for him. He lives, ads, thinks, speaks Hke a 
bad man, and to say nothing of popularity — very 
few of us have any — but who will have any resped 
for a man that scorns, jeers, sneers and pokes all 
manner of fun at respedability ? Respedability, he 
says, is a mark of pubhc formahty behind which to 
hide private rascality, and the prettier the mask the 
more ugly the face. 

54 



^'The Goodness of a Bad Man'' 

" He disagrees with nearly everybody on almost 
every conceivable subjed:. No matter what other 
people think of his opinions, he ad:ually believes 
them to be right. He is a bad man. He is not at all 
tolerant. When he disagrees with any one — and he 
does that most of the time — he bluntly and boldly 
tells him so up and down, and he is ever ready to 
state his reasons and argue the case. He will not con- 
ceal his convidiions, even when he is your guest. Of 
course, this is a free country, and every man is en- 
titled to his opinion — but one should have some 
tad:, politeness, diplomacy, courtesy. If every one 
had these there would not be so much difference of 
opinion and discord in our land, and there would 
be more peace on earth. Polite people do not try to 
force their opinions upon others. 
" Polite people have no opinions that differ from 
those of others. I doubt whether it is polite to have 
any opinions at all. The aristocracy is setting a good 
example. It never thinks. Persons who think too 
much are ever behind the times. But even if one has 
a right to his opinion, he certainly has no right to 
be cranky, eccentric, and disturb the mental peace 
of the community with his queer, revolutionary no- 
tions. Stubborn, stiff-necked, hard-headed, deter- 
mined, impulsive, he is ever present with that ubiq- 
uitous mind of his, ever ready to give everybody 
a piece of it. Considering the frequency with which 
he gives everybody a piece of his mind, I wonder 
that it is not all gone by this time. 

55 



Discourses of Keidansky 

"He is a bad man. He is aggressive and arrogant. 
His faith in himself is offensive, his self-reliance, 
self-satisfad:ion unbearable. He has too much re- 
sped for himself to follow the didates of others. His 
life is a Hfe, he says, and not an apology for living ; 
he will have to pay for it with death and wants to 
make the most of the bargain — live fully and freely 
in his own way, however reprehensible. He does not 
want his neighbors to love and interfere with him — 
unless he cared for their affecSlion. He says it would 
be a sin to love his neighbors if they did not deserve 
his love. The welfare of the community, I heard him 
say, depends upon the absolute freedom, the self- 
salvation of each individual. No one can ever do 
anything for another unless he has made the most 
of his own life — good or bad. Self-preservation in 
the end prompts us to do most for others. Selfish- 
ness is a pronounced form of sanity. Altruism has 
enslaved the world. Egoism will save it. And I could 
quote you such monstrous heresies as will make your 
hair stand on end. He is a bad man. 
"The world belongs to those who take things for 
granted. He will not take anything for granted and 
that's why he has to take more hard knocks than 
anybody else. He impiously questions, doubts, ex- 
amines, investigates everything on the face of the 
earth and — God save us — even the things that be 
in heaven. He is a living interrogation point, ever 
questioning the wisdom of this world and the prom- 
ises of the one to come. Nothing is so sacred as to 

S6 



"The Goodness of a Bad Man'''' 

be above his scrutiny; he has little reverence for any 
of our glorious institutions. He says they are the 
handiwork of men and often as crude and as useless 
as men could make them. Whatever has been erect- 
ed can be corredled, he says. He thinks lightly of 
our laws; thinks they are at best but a necessary evil 
and that in the course of human events it becomes 
necessary to abolish all evil. 

"He is a bad man. He does not even recognize the 
sacred authority of tradition, and has no decent re- 
gard for precedent. Precedent, he argues, only proves 
that some people lived before us and did things in 
a certain way. He does not even — well, think of a 
man who doubts the holy right of the majority ! He 
does not believe that the majority is always right ; 
in fa6t, he contends that it is always wrong. By the 
time the majority discovers a truth it becomes a 
falsehood, he avers. The majority only thinks it is 
always right. The majority is but another word for 
mediocrity. He does not heed what the people say. 
The monster called majority, in spite of his many 
heads, does very little thinking. What the people say 
seldom amounts to a meaning. Morality, he argues, 
is that which is conducive to one's happiness, with- 
out interfering with or injuring his fellow-men. To 
be moral is to live fully, freely, completely. Moral- 
ity has nothing to do with the abnormal stifling, 
starving, thwarting of instincts and feelings. 
"A truth, he told me, is a truth, and a principle is 
a principle, whether it is held by many or by one. 

57 



Discourses of Keidansky 

Numbers no more make right than might does. 
" ' The strongest man on earth/ he says, 'is he who 
stands alone/ and he always quotes a man named 
Ibsen. He is a bad case. ' Customs and convention- 
alities be hanged/ he says, ' I have my own life to 
live and mean to manage it in my own way. I have 
laws of my own and must obey them.' I heard him 
say it myself, and I wonder what he means by these 
things. There are always those who know better than 
you what is good for you, but you don't want to 
mind them, he told me. The most advisable thing 
in the world is never to take any advice. There may 
be those, he once remarked, who have lived longer 
than you have, but they have not lived your life. 
" He has a mania for principles. I think that is a 
chronic disease with him. He imagines it is all one 
needs in life. There is not a material advantage in 
the world but he would forfeit it for a moral prin- 
ciple, as he calls it. ' Ideals are very well,' I once said, 
'but one must live.' 'Not necessarily,' he answered. 
' One must die, if one cannot live honestly.' 
"Always he talks about the so-called social problem 
of the age. I do not know just what that is ; but if 
there is such a thing as a social problem it is how to 
abolish social reformers. This man is a social re- 
former, and he has some scheme of his own how to 
reconstrud: society on a basis of what he terms jus- 
tice and truth. In the promulgation of this scheme 
of his he foolishly spends much of his spare time and 
not a little of his money — and Heaven knows he 

58 



''The Goodness of a Bad Man'' 

has not any too much. But he says he does it all for 
his pleasure ; that it is out of sheer selfishness that 
he would uplift the fallen and elevate the lowly. He 
is a bad man. It is no disgrace to be poor, of course ; 
but it is criminal of the poor not to know their place. 
I half told him so, but he answered in his usual con- 
tradictory way that the poor have no place at all. 
"He travels through life very much by his own 
crooked road, with his own conception of morality, 
justice and truth. Out of justice to the dead, he 
argues, we ought to abolish most of the institutions 
they have left behind. Otherwise they are being dis- 
graced every day by the clumsy workings of the 
things they have established. If our honored ances- 
tors desired to perpetuate their taboos, fetishes and 
inquisitions they had no business to die ; they should 
have stayed here. By going to either of the places 
beyond they have forfeited their right to manage 
things here below. The dead should give the living 
absolute home rule. 

" He is a bad man. He hardly ever gives any charity. 
He does not believe in charity; says it creates more 
misery than it relieves, and perpetuates poverty — 
the crime of mankind. Charity, he claims, curses 
both the giver and the receiver. Itmakes the former 
haughty and proud and the latter dependent and 
servile. What he wants is justice and the rights of 
all to earn the means of subsistence. And there is no 
use in quoting the Bible, when he talks of poverty. 
The Bible, he says, is a great book which could be 

S9 



Discourses of Keidansky 

immensely improved by a good editor with a long 
blue pencil. All the immoral problem-plays pale in- 
to pitiful insignificance beside some of the stories 
told in the Bible — and they are not anywhere half 
so well told. Did you ever hear such blasphemy ? He 
is an infidel. He does not even believe the news- 
papers; has little faith in the great power of the press. 
Most of the newspapers, he told me, are published 
by the advertisers and edited by the readers. Jour- 
nalists ever follow public opinion, and they are never 
sure of what they believe in because it is hard to find 
out what the people approve. Weather Bureau pre- 
dictions are often Gospel truths beside editorial con- 
vidions. The best papers are yet to be printed. He 
has such rank disregard of the past and the present 
that he seems to think that all things really great are 
yet to come. 

" He puzzles and vexes me. I don*t know just what 
he is in politics. I doubt whether he is either a Repub- 
lican or a Democrat. I susped: he votes for the Anar- 
chist party. What an absurdity ! They will neverele6t 
a President, and this foolish man has not the ghost of 
a chance to get an office. He is not at all consistent. 
He changes his mind very often. No matter how 
zealous or ardent he is about his ideas he is ever 
ready to rejed: them to-morrow and accept other 
views. He does not believe in the newspapers, in 
things visible and present, yet he has the utmost 
faith in far-away fidions, intangible Utopias and the 
realization of iridescent dreams. 

60 



ii 



T6e Goodness of a Bad Man''' 

" I dare not repeat all his outrageous blasphemies, 
and I positively cannot mention his awful heresies 
as to his religion. He cannot accept the religion of 
his fathers because they were infidels; infidels who 
built little creeds out of fear, who were afraid of their 
shadows, who had monstrous, libellous conceptions 
of God. He says that he has too much faith to be- 
long to any denomination. Religion is so large that 
no church can hold it. No one should meddle be- 
tween man and his Maker. Christ, I have heard him 
say, may never forgive the Christians for what they 
have made out of him, for robbing him of his hu- 
manity. No church for him. He would rather wor- 
ship beneath the arched dome of the starry skies and 
offer up a prayer to the God that dwells in every 
human heart and thinking brain. He is a bad man. 
" He is always on the ungrateful side of the few, the 
poor, the weak and the fallen ; and he even sympa- 
thizes with beggars, criminals, fallen women and low 
persons ; is not afraid to mingle with them. And what 
advantage can he ever derive out of that? Absent- 
minded, forgetful, engrossed in his queer ideas and 
impossible ideals, he gets lost in his theories and 
books, and loses life. He does not realize that mil- 
lions have found this world as it is and millions 
more will leave it so. Poor man, he is a dreamer of 
dreams; and to see the invisible, to hear inaudible 
voices, is the most expensive thing in life. He sac- 
rifices affluence, influence, power, political office, 
honor, eclat ^ applause, the respect of the community, 

6i 



Discourses of Keidansky 

the regard of his neighbors, the praise of the press, 
the advantages of pohtics and of the people's ap- 
proval — sacrifices all these for his pitiful brain-be- 
gotten fancies. He is a dreamer of dreams. Yet he 
seems to like this journey along the lines of most 
resistance, says it is least resistance to him, and he 
tells me that he enjoys his poverty and all, im- 
mensely. He freely indulges in most of the vain and 
worldly pleasures of life as he sees them, regardless 
of all others, considers one day as holy as another and 
no day so mean as to wear a long and sand:imonious 
face on, and he says that the only thing which he 
prohibits is prohibition in any form. His wife does 
not fear him, does not have to obey him, does as she 
pleases, and his children are as free and wild as little 
savages. He is a bad man. 

" But what can be done? Ministers and other good 
men have repeatedly tried to save him, but he evades 
all their efforts, avoids all their sermons. He would 
save them the trouble of saving him, he says, because 
he thinks he can do it so much better himself. What 
can be done? All things are here to serve him, none 
to subserve him. He is a law unto himself, and has 
little or nothing to do with the Government, so he 
says. He is a bad man. He is not going to heaven 
— and yet, and yet — if there were more like him 
this world would be so different, and perhaps no one 
would ever want to go to heaven." 
There was a pause and a silence at the close of the 
reading, but our essayist was soon spared " the agony 

62 



"T'he Goodness of a Bad Man'' 

of suspense," as he mockingly remarked. Then came 
comments of varied shades of opinion, approving 
and disapproving, constru6live and destructive, too 
many to mention, and Keidansky enjoyed them all. 
At length I ventured to ask him what sort of ad- 
ministrator his friend, the bad man, would make if 
he was ever elected to office. 

" He would never run for office," said Keidansky, 
"and if he ran he would never be eleded; and if he 
ever was eleded he would certainly be a dire failure 
because he does not believe in managing other 
people's business. The best of men will not want to, 
cannot do it, and politics is no test. The man who 
goes in with or for the crowd ceases to be himself; 
and therefore we ought to invent our public officials 
and not make them out of men. However, don't 
press me, I am not at all sure about these things. I 
only know that the bad man is coming; that he is 
here; that he is a dire terror — and will save the 
world. What I gave you here is a mere suggestion, 
a hint of a possibility, a premonition. Every concep- 
tion is spoiled by the description of it. He will come, 
and time will not tame him. He will come, and the 
divine institution of police-court morality is doomed. 
The virtues of the future will be useful. They will 
be conducive to growth — real happiness. 
" But, as I say^ I don't want to appear dogmatic ; 
nor to be too sure of things. The most useful thing 
about our theories is that we know them to be use- 
less. The best thing about our ideas is that the 

63 



Discourses of Keidansky 

world has not accepted them yet. If the world had 
accepted them these ideas would probably now look 
like last winter's snow. Better to wait until it is ready 
for them — then they will not go to waste. Better a 
bad world than a good world come too early — be- 
fore the people are ready for it. But what's the use ! 
I 've done it, my friends, and my apology for life is 
— that I never apologize. Come, it's getting close, 
up here. Come, let us forth into the darkness and 
pray for eternal night — for night hides all the ugly 
splendors of the world." 



64 



VIII 

*' 'The Feminine Traits of Men' ^ 



Y 



OU are as inquisitive as a man," said Kei- 

dansky. 

" You mean — " I tried to corred: him. 
" I mean as inquisitive as a man," he repeated. 
This was at a social gathering, a Purim festival given 
by the B'nai Zion Educational Society at Zion Hall. 
We sat in the little back room adjoining the main 
hall, which formed the library of the society. There 
was a good fire in the stove ; we were just far enough 
away from the music and the dance to enjoy it, and 
also to relish our chat. 

I suppose I had gone beyond the point of discre- 
tion in my quest of information; that I asked some 
questions of a rather personal nature which my friend 
thought best to leave unanswered, and hence the re- 
buke I received. 

" Some one," said Keidansky, "ought to write an es- 
say on 'The Feminine Traits of Men,' and point 
out in what a pronounced form men possess the 
traits, objed:ionable and acceptable, they constantly 
attribute to women. For centuries women have borne 
the blame and ridicule and criticism for qualities they 
either have in the mildest, most insignificant forms, 
or do not possess at all — when you compare them 
to men. And it 's about time they should be vindi- 
cated, and the truth should make them free from this 

65 



Discourses of Keidansky 

popular misconception. It seems to me that in a cer- 
tain way men have actually monopolized most of the 
objedtionable traits of women ; and to have shifted 
all the blame on them for all these years was a cry- 
ing shame — an outrageous wrong. 
" Yes, some one ought to write about it ; some one 
who is young, handsome and gallant — so that he 
may receive the gratitude of the fair sex. For in- 
stance, woman is said to be inquisitive. But who, 
really, is so anxious to know, so peevish, petulant 
and prurient as man is? Who like him will go to so 
much trouble to find out the minutest detail about 
men, women and things that surround him? Who is 
so eager and diligent in his search of information, 
knowledge and light? Who likeunto him — I mean, 
his majesty, man — takes such loving interest in his 
neighbors and pries so pitilessly into their private 
affairs ? Who makes such an excellent reporter, de- 
tective, biographer? Who are the successful editors 
of our newspapers? Men, of course. They are the 
ones who constantly load you with questions, who 
are ever endeavoring to peer into your inmost self 
and who always want to know about your past, pres- 
ent, future, former and later incarnations. I am told, 
on good authority, that genealogy — which I un- 
derstand to be the science of proving that your great- 
grandfather was somebody and that somebody was 
your great-grandmother — that this science has been 
nurtured and garnered and brought up to its present 
state of perfection, or imperfe(5tion, by men. 

66 



''T'he Femi77ine Traits of Men'' 

" It 's appalling, this curiosity of man," he con- 
tinued fervently. "He can go sixteen miles out of 
his way to pick up the smallest scrap of a fad;, or 
fancy. He can colled: endless stores of useless infor- 
mation. He fancies nothing so much as fads. His 
thirst for knowledge cannot be satiated even by flat- 
tery. Men not only make encyclopaedias, but they 
adually use them. They not only build and endow 
libraries, but they adually utilize them — spoil their 
eyes over musty, misty, mazy volumes. And then, 
how anxious we all are to be posted on the most un- 
important things concerning our friends and the peo- 
ple we meet and know ; we are ever attempting to 
read their minds and their hearts, and if there are 
none, we put meanings into them. Have not the 
greatest novelists been men? 

" Motke Chabad, the Jewish jester, once came to a 
strange town near his native city of Wilna, and as he 
entered the community a patriarchal old Israelite 
accosted him with the usual Shalom aleichem. Ma 
simecho ? ' Peace be with thee, stranger. What is thy 
name? * 

" ' It 's none of your business,' answered Motke. 
" When asked why he thus rudely aded toward the 
old man, Motke Chabad explained that had he told 
the stranger his name the other would have asked 
where he came from, what his business was, how 
many children he had, if he was married, how old 
his father was, if he was still living, if he had any rel- 
atives in America, if he ever was blessed by the great 

67 



Discourses of Keidansky 

rabbi of Wilna, etc., etc., and, said Chabad, ' to say 
nothing of my morning prayers, I had not as yet had 
my breakfast, when I met him.' 
" Chabad, you see, knew his brother, man. Men curi- 
ous to know? Rose Dartle is nothing beside Andrew 
Lang, and he has this advantage over her — that he 
exists and can find things out. Another instance. You 
go into your store or fadlory in the morning. You 
have a slight toothache. You feel and look rather 
seedy, and the man who works next to you comes 
over and sympathetically asks you why it was that 
she rejedled you, why the other fellow won her heart, 
by what magic charms your rival eclipsed you, etc., 
and he keeps on with his queries until you tell him — 
" Go stand up on the first corner. Take off your hat 
and cry out : ' Gentlemen, this is a hat, this is a hat ! 
Look into it ! ' And in a few seconds you will have a 
big throng of curious men standing about and star- 
ing at you. Women who will happen along will pass 
right on, but men will stand there and stare — like 
men. 

" There was a time when certain things were consid- 
ered beyond the scrutiny of curious men, when they 
were held too sacred for investigations and explana- 
tions, when the things that were not understood were 
deemed holy and when men stood in reverence be- 
fore these things and bowed and took off their think- 
ing caps. But now they want to know everything — 
even the things that are of prime importance. And 
there is no use in telling them that nothing really 

68 



''The Feminine Traits of Men'*'' 

exists — not even the logic of Christian Scientists. 
They want to know. They must find the fadls or 
make them. What 's the use of Hving if one does n t 
know just on what date King Pharaoh died ? No 
news may be good news, but you can't run a news- 
paper on that principle now-a-days. Whether the 
things happen or not man wants to know the 
fa6ts and the details of the cases. They must know. 
Knowledge is power. To know is to be able to boast 
of it. And men ever boast of what they know or think 
they know. 

" But why say more? The colledled knowledge, the 
accumulated data and science of the world suffi- 
ciently prove the inquisitiveness of men. It is one 
faculty which works many ways, you know, and 
these ways are shaped by circumstances and condi- 
tions. Now a man peeps through a keyhole to get 
some material for a bit of gossip, and then he looks 
up to the stars to make an astronomical observation. 
But the Darwins and the Newtons and the Her- 
schels prove how curious to know men really are. 
" And it is their extreme vanity, too, that makes 
men so presumptuous, ostentatious and obstreper- 
ous. They have so much faith in themselves that no 
self-respedling person can trust them. They are so 
confident in their right to know, so convinced of the 
value of their knowledge, so sure of the absolute 
necessity of their volubility. They are so unbearably 
overbearing, self-conscious and self-centred that 
they forget there are others besides them in this 

69 



Discourses of Keidansky 

world. It is their vanity that makes men speak in 
volumes. 

" Then they say that women gossip, but you know 
that they are far outdone, almost totally eclipsed in 
this respedl, too, by men. Men are the real, rapid- 
transit champion gossips and talkers of the world. 
It was a dark and dismal night, as the story goes, 
and we all sat around the fire and the captain said, 
'Jack, tell us a story,' and Jack told a number of 
stories, and so did others, and we all told of divers 
devilish, wicked things our friends had done, and in 
our heart of hearts were awfully sorry we did not do 
these things ourselves, and we made mud-cakes out 
of good, well-preserved reputations. Oh, how well 
we can and how we do talk about our neighbors; but 
you know, people do like to talk about those whom 
they lovec Marie Corelli recently said — now do not 
scowl because I quote Marie Corelli. She is a very 
good woman ; only she could not resist the tempta- 
tion to write a few novels, and they may not be so 
bad, only I could never get myself to read them be- 
cause I heard that Queen Vi(5loria liked them im- 
mensely. Hold on, though; I guess I did read one 
of these novels in a Yiddish translation ; but that was 
because the translator did not say whose work it was. 
I think he thought it was original with himself. In 
fad, he passed it off as his own — which was a brave 
thing to do, though the book proved to be popular. 
But I lost my train of thought. Marie Corelli re- 
cently said that she never endured such a babel of 

70 



"The Feminine Traits of Men'''' 

gossiping tongues as she once heard when being en- 
tertained to luncheon at a men's club, and she added, 
' nor have I known many more reputations picked 
to pieces than on that occasion.' But a recent writer 
told us what awful gossips all the historians have 
been, and they were all men. We were told that 
Herodotus, who is the father of history, was also one 
of the most inveterate of gossips. Saint Simon was 
considered essentially a gossip, and even therefore a 
wonderful historianof the time of Louis XV. Pepys, 
this writer told us, was the greatest gossip that ever 
lived, also the greatest historian of his time. Even 
Mommsen, we were told, shows some of the traits 
ofagossipinhis monumental historyof Rome. The 
same was said of Gibbon and many others. Gossip 
is not only the raw material of history, we were in- 
formed, but it is also the raw material of the realistic 
novel, and as I said before, the finest novels have 
been produced by the sons of Adam. 
"Women are also charged with being loquacious, 
but that is another trumped-up, false charge. You 
well know that the loquaciousness of men is prodi- 
gious, tremendous. Man is the most wonderful talk- 
ing machine ever invented, and one of his favorite 
topics is the talkativeness of woman. Men talk you 
to mental derangement and death wherever you go. 
There is no escape. Nearly every man you meet is 
ready to tell you the sad story of his life — sad, be- 
cause he is ready to tell it. Many of them write their 
autobiographies, and what with these and their ser- 

71 



Discourses of Keidansky 

mons and orations, novels and essays, histories and 
philosophies — there will soon be no more room for 
libraries. And the worst thing about man's garrulity- 
is that he taxes the intelle6t so heavily, that what he 
says is loaded with so much meaning. Anything a 
man says, you know, is in danger of becoming litera- 
ture. It 's appalling. He always makes you think, 
whereas what little a woman does say is so light and 
airy, breezy and restive. A woman, too, writes a book, 
occasionally, but she does not mean anything by it. 
" But men are so very bad in this resped:, so terribly 
blatant. They never cease talking. When they don't 
talk they write, and the pen is worse than the sword. 
Why am I afraid to ask the man, who stands near 
me waiting for a car, what time it is ? Because he 
might tell me of his grandfather's heroic exploits in 
the Civil War. To have gone to war was cruel ; but 
to have left some one behind to boast of it was crim- 
inal. Why am I afraid to read the latest short story 
that I have written to my friend? Because he might 
show me a poem just done. And 1 nearly forgot to 
point out what a monumental proof of naive garrul- 
ity the Talmud is. The Talmud, that strange con- 
glomeration of law, love, legend, gossip, fable, and 
occasionally a bit of wisdom, which one can find if 
one searches diligently. 

"They say also that women are capricious and 
changeful; but the progress of the world shows how 
easily men change their minds. Yes, some one ought 
to write an essay and point these things out,andvin- 

72 



''The Feminine Traits of Men'' 

dicate a much-maligned sex. It 's a good chance for 
a man for some interesting gossip on the subjed:.'* 
" I suppose, hen, that you believe in woman's 
rights," I at length haphazarded an interruption. 
"Yes," answered Keidansky, " I believe that women 
should have all their rights, and should not, as the 
French cynic would have it, be killed at forty. It*s 
too late. I mean," he added quickly, "that it 's too 
late to talk any more about it." 



73 



IX 

T^he Value of Ignorance 



cc 



w 



HAT do I know? I don't know any- 
thing," said Keidansky, "and I don't 
care to." 

" I thought you were always in quest of knowledge," 
I remarked. 

"I am," he answered: "I am infatuated with the 
quest, I love it. It is so exhilarating, stirring, full of 
excitement and fraught with danger." 
"Danger? Wherein is that?" I asked. 
"The danger," he emphasized, "is in finding the 
knowledge I am in quest of; for once your search 
has been answered with success, and you have in- 
formed yourself with the fa6ls of the case, the game 
is up and the fun is over, as the Americans say. The 
hallucination of the glorious quest is shattered, the 
suspense is spoiled, the ecstatic expectations are de- 
stroyed, and we become fit subjedls for illustrations 
in the Fliegende Blatter, 'A little knowledge is a 
dangerous thing' and a lot of it is fatal. Yes, knowl- 
edge is might, but illusion is omnipotence. So I like 
to seek information well enough, but I would rather 
not know." 

I became interested, although scandalized, and my 
companion kept on musing aloud. 
" Not to know is to hope, to fear, to be in delight- 
ful uncertainty, to dream fair dreams, to imagine the 

75 



Discourses of Keidansky 

most impossible things, to wonder and marvel at all 
in childlike innocence, to build the most beautiful 
castles in the air, to give the imagination full swing, 
to conjure up the most fantastic mythological melo- 
dramas, to stand with deep awe and inspired rever- 
ence before all the mighty manifestations of nature, 
to form the finest idols, to build splendid religions, 
to have faith and to foster it, to see the invisible, to 
draw gorgeous rainbows of promise upon the hori- 
zon of life, in a word, not to know is to sustain per- 
fed: illusion, not to go behind the scenes, is to enjoy 
the entire performance. 

" On the other hand, my dear fellow, to know is to 
have your wings clipped, to see the distance between 
the earth and the skies and the difference between 
you and what you thought yourself to be, to feel 
your littleness and become dreadfully aware of the 
absurdity of it all, to have the imagination arrested 
for trespassing, to be rejected from the castles you 
built for non-payment of taxes, to be punished for 
the idleness of your idols, to see your little demi- 
gods crumble at the rate of sixteen a minute, to 
become aware of the futility of the whole business, 
the shortness of terms given you, the unstability of 
your credit, to find that you are but a feather blown 
hither and thither by the whirlwind of the world, 
that your greatest plan may be demolished by a 
whim of fate, to learn that the stupid moon really 
does not look so pale because of your unrequited 
love, and that the great sun does not shine because 

76 



"The Value of Ignorance 

you are going to a picnic, to discover that your 
credulity was the only miracle that ever happened, 
and that even gods suffer from dyspepsia, to lose 
faith, become sceptic, abandon religion, move out of 
the balmy fairyland of tradition and freeze in the 
realms of right reason. To know is to be deprived 
even of that little confidence in your power to al- 
ter the course of the universe; to recognize how 
inexorable, inscrutable, indifferent, the powers of 
life are, and what a common pedigree all things of 
beauty have ; it is to have the dramatic effed: of 
the play spoiled and to vote it all a farce and a fail- 
ure. 

" We are all becoming so educated now-a-days that 
we no longer know the value of ignorance, and we 
have nearly forgotten things of goodness and of 
beauty that it has brought into the world. Ignorance 
is the mazy mist of morning in which so much is 
born; it is the mystic dimness wherein all things 
awe and enchant forever. Ignorance is the begin- 
ning of the world ; knowledge is the end of it. In the 
unexplored vastnesses of ignorance the mind soars 
through all the heavens and works wonders ; in the 
measured spheres of knowledge the mind travels 
carefully and creates little as far as mythology, theol- 
ogy, religion and poetry are concerned. Were it not 
for ignorance we would not have had all the wealth 
of legends and fables and fairy tales and sagas and 
mdrchen, strange, weird, wonderful, to intoxicate the 
imagination of the world and enable us to live for 

77 



Discourses of Keidansky 

centuries in lands of magic and charm and dream- 
like realities. And if you see some works of beauty 
and nobility in the world to delight you, it is because 
we have just come out of these lands, and we are imi- 
tating and re-creating what we saw there. There are 
some who still dwell in them, and they send us 
messages and often bless us with their visits. 
"Thank you for stopping me. I should not have 
liked to be run over before you had listened to the 
rest of my argument; besides, it makes a mess of 
one. This is a dangerous crossing — for a debate. 
But, to continue: Were it not for ignorance — had 
we known everything about God — Europe would 
not be dotted with all the beautiful cathedrals and 
the wonderful treasures of art that are an everlast- 
ing source of enchantment and inspiration. Were it 
not for the same reason we would not have such a 
beauty spot in Boston as Copley square, with its two 
imposing churches. Library and Museum of Art. 
And remembering that all objects to delight the eye, 
the ear and the mind began at the earliest shrines 
of worship, we can barely calculate how poor and 
meagre all our arts would have been were it not for 
this ignorance. What would poetry — in the largest 
sense — what would it be were it not for this igno- 
rance concerning Providence? And poetry is the 
main motive, the quintessence of all the other arts. 
Religion is the great question mark of the world, 
and what you ask for religion I ask for ignorance. 
Whether the makers of the Bible wrote on space or 

78 



The Value of Ignorance 

not, no one can deny its high value as a work of 
poetry and fid:ion ; and as much can be said for all 
the other sacred books of the great faiths. 
"The mood of ignorance is worth everything: it is 
wonder, amazement, naivete, child-like innocence, 
fairy-like dreaminess. 

"In ignorance we trust, trusting we serve, serving 
we achieve, achieving we glorify our names. Not 
to know is to long for, to exped: everything — and 
work for it; while to know is to be sure of this or 
that, and there is something significant in the coup- 
ling of the words, 'dead sure.* 'Tis good to have 
faith ; what we believe in is or comes true. The illu- 
sion is the thing that makes the play. We are all 
chasing after phantoms, but the chase is a reality, 
and it's all in all. The less we know about the re- 
sults — perhaps the more we do. And not knowing 
how incapable we are, some of us do remarkable 
things. 

"A Jewish legend tells us that before the human 
soul is doomed to be born it knows everything, is 
informed of all knowledge — including, I presume, 
a knowledge of the Talmudic laws of marriage and 
divorce — but that at its birth an angel appears, gives 
the child a schnel in noz^ or tap on the nose, which 
causes the infant to forget everything it knows so 
that it may be born absolutely ignorant. That is a 
good angel, I say, who performs a good office, and 
not like the rest of them, who, according to John 
Hay, are loafing around the throne. Here is a use- 

79 



Discourses of Keidansky 

ful angel. For to give the child its ignorance is to 
confer a great boon; to make it capable of some- 
thing in life. It is a valuable gift, though earthly- 
creatures soon spoil the good work of the angel 
and stuff the child's head full of all sorts of useless 
knowledge. Soon the mind is clogged, the faculties 
for thinking, wondering, understanding are turned 
into a phonographic apparatus for remembering 
what should never have been learned, and the 
imagination is nipped in the bud, told to be corred: 
and keep still. With all my inability to learn and dis- 
inclination to know, there are still a few things I 
have been trying to forget all my life, but I cannot 
do it. At the point of a cane my rabbi drove these 
things into my head. So if I ever impart any infor- 
mation to you, forgive me for I cannot forget. Here 
in America and in modernity, where superstition is 
such that people actually believe in the existence of 
fads, the schools and colleges form tremendous sys- 
tems of stupefa6tion. Poor little heads of innocent 
children are packed, cramped and crowded with dates 
and names and all sorts of insignificant data. They 
teach them everything — except what interests them, 
and they are made to repeat and to remember all 
things dry and dull and dreary. ' Fads, fads, fads,* 
the teachers cry, not knowing that there are no fad:s 
in real life. Minds are measured, ideas must be of a 
certain size, you must think but one thought at a 
time and remember all things in history that never 
happened. Thus, fancy, whim, suggestion, imagina- 

80 



T'he Value of Ignorance 

tion are sadly negledted, and the finest faculties are 
left behind. Everybody knows everything, but no 
one understands anything. 

"'Tis so with people generally — they are all clam- 
oring for what they call fads, explaining things after 
fixed formulas, making the most astonishing, dead- 
sure statements; in short, spreading useful knowl- 
edge. They all have ideas and theories and philoso- 
phies after a fashion; they have sized this universe 
up, past, present and future, and they can explain 
every thingexcept themselves. Everybody has found 
a few 'fad:s,' and after these fashioned a universal 
panacea, a little patented plan for solving the social 
problem. There are so many solutions that it is hard 
to find just what the problem is. Reform is so much 
in style that even a corn dodlor proclaims himself 
a social saviour. The social reformers with their sure 
cures, positive fad:s and all-saving systems are the 
plague of the age. There is no escape from these 
things they call certain and positive and indisput- 
able. Figures and statistics and so-called fad:s make 
up the sum of our life. Life is harnessed by systems 
and we are strangled by statistics. The subtle, the 
strange, the symbolic, the suggestive, the intuitive, 
the poetic and imaginative, theflash-lights that make 
you see eternity in a moment — these are over- 
looked and neglected. The things really true are for- 
gotten. What is that Persian legend about the man 
who devoted his life to planting and rearing and rais- 
ing the tree of knowledge in his garden, and after- 

8i 



Discourses of Keidansky 

wards, in his old age, was hanged thereon? What? 
There is no such Persian legend? Well, then, some 
Englishman ought to write it. At any rate this shows 
the value of knowledge. The fruit of the tree of 
knowledge is now sweet, now bitter — but mostly- 
bitter. We analyze and examine so much these days 
that we find within ourselves and in our surround- 
ings the symptoms of all diseases and all evil. To 
quote a quaint but true Zangwillism, 'Analysis is 
paralysis, introspedion is viviseftion, and culture 
drives us mad.' We measure things so closely and 
leave no room for the surprising, the spontaneous, 
the freely flowing, the lifelike. The age of reason has 
come and we are no longer wise. We have forgotten 
what we owe to ignorance. ' He knows everything,' 
said the do6lor; 'there is no hope for him.' 
"In their ignorance of human nature and natural law 
idealists have dreamed and created the most unat- 
tainable Utopias, and their impossible visions shaped 
our destiny and made us great. The stirring speech 
that Lametkin delivered this evening is partly due 
to his ignorance of things and his blind faith in his 
panacea, but it enthused his audience immensely, 
and it will have a wonderful effed: upon their lives. 
The other day I read some beautiful lines by Owen 
Meredith about the child who cries 'to clutch the 
star that shines in splendor over his Httle cot.' The 
matter-of-fad: father says that it is folly, that it is 
milHons of miles away, and that 'the star descends 
not to twinkle on the little one's bed.' But the 

82 



The Value of Ignorance 

mother tenderly tells the child to sleep and promises 
to pluck the star for it and by-and-by 

^ Lay it upon the pillow bright with dew^ 

and then the child sleeps and dreams of stars whose 
light 
^ Beams in his own bright eyes when he awakes J 

"Now in these lines one may find justification for all 
the idealizations of art, but they are also suggestive 
of the value of ignorance. So it is. We must learn 
to see the invisible. We must be oblivious to the 
obvious, to see anything. We ought not to try to 
clear up everything. If life were not a problem play it 
would not interest us so. Let the mystery remain. 
Intimations of immortality aregood enough; proofs 
would kill our longing for it. Whence? Whither.? I 
rather hope these questions will never be answered. 
The halo, the maze, the mystery, the shadowy 
strangeness of it all makes it worth while and gives 
the fancy freedom to fly. Statistics sterilize the imagi- 
nation and figures dry up our souls. Do you re- 
member Whitman's 'When I Heard the Learned 
Astronomers?* The lecturer with his charts and dia- 
grams soon made him unaccountably sick, till rising 
and gliding out of the le6lure room he wandered off 
by himself 'in the mystical, moist night-air, and 
from time to time looked up in perfed: silence at the 
stars,' and thus became himself again. 
" Let others seek what they call fad:s : for me the 
lights and the shades, the dimness and the flash, 

83 



Discourses of Keidansky 

the chiaroscuro of hfe. Let others pierce through 
phenomena and impregnate reahties ; my favorite 
amusement is to walk upon the clouds and play ball 
with the stars. I cannot grasp such details as the size 
of the earth, the distance between sun and moon. 
Logic? Lockjaw. Go study your astronomy and let 
me lie on my back in some verdant field and gaze 
upon the stars, and I shall be content. Let others 
study botany, give me but the fragrance of the 
blooms and flowers and letme gaze upon their gor- 
geous riots of color. For others the study of anatomy, 
for me the beauty of the human form to behold. Let 
others study ornithology, and let me listen to the 
thrilling music of the winged songsters. Take all the 
sciences that explain everything away, and give me 
the things beautiful to behold, sweet to hear and 
pleasing to touch. And before you run away let me 
also tell you that there is a mood of contemplation 
which, for comprehension, passeth all science and 
analysis. 

" But, after all,*' he added, as we were about to part, 
" I could only hint at these things, for it takes a very 
learned man to prove the value of ignorance." 



84 



Days of Atonement 

ALL day the Ghetto was astir.There was a babel 
ZJm of excitement at the markets,an unusual rush 
X -A- and bustle on Allen street. The stores were 
well filled with bargaining, buying men and women, 
and the push-cart vendors were centres of attra6led 
crowds. Everywhere housewives were busy washing, 
clearing, cleaning their homes.The spirit of awe, rev- 
erence, expedlancy, was in the air. The great day of 
Rosh Hashona was approaching; New Year's day 
was drawing nigh. 

We stood on the sidewalk in front of Berosowsky's 
book and periodical emporium, the strange place 
where you can procure anything from Bernard Fei- 
genbaum's pamphlets against religion, to a pair of 
phyladleries, from Tolstoy's works in Yiddish to a 
holy scroll. We stood and gazed on the familiar yet 
fascinating scene.We had just left the store, wherein 
we glanced through the current newspapers and 
other publications. " It is so stupid to read. Let's go 
out and look at the people," Keidansky exclaimed 
abruptly as he threw down a eulogy of a Yiddish 
poet written by himself, in the paper of which he is 
now editor. 

Not far off was heard the short, shrill sound of the 
ram's horn. It was the "bal tkio," the official syna- 
gogue trumpeter practising for the nearing ominous 

85 



Discourses of Keidansky 

days. Hard by, a cantor and his choir of sweet voices 
were rehearsing the quaint hymns and prayers of the 
great fast, singing the strange, tearful, traditional 
melodies that have never been written, and yet have 
come down from generation to generation for hun- 
dreds of years ; the weird musical wailings, the tunes 
of the cheerless chants, charged with the sighs, groans 
and laments of centuries of sufferings, flooded the 
noisy street, mingled with the harsh cries of the 
hucksters, and were lost in the general buzz and roar 
of the crowded distrid:. 

" The days of awe and of atonement are upon us,*' said 
Keidansky, "and these evocative, awakening voices 
are drawing, drawing me back to the synagogue, 
back to the days of childhood, faith, hope, igno- 
rance, innocence, peace, and plenty of sleep. A 
broken note of old music, then a flood of memories, 
a sway of feeling, and no matter what I have, or have 
not been, I am again as pious and penitent, and as 
passionately religious, as I was when a child in the 
most God-fearing Ghetto in the world. 
"Did you say something about free thought, the 
higher criticism, universal religion, about the law of 
evolution applied to religion, about all creeds being 
equally true and equally false? Did you talk to me 
about these things ? 

"Well, a scrap of Yom Kippur melody and the faith 
of my fathers is my faith. Our instind:s destroy our • 
philosophies. ' Our feelings and affedions are wiser 
than we are ! * The old is preserved for our self-pres- 

86 



Days of Atonement 

ervation. The new is destrudlve, bewildering. The 
old is often worth deserting, yet it is bred in the bone ; 
it is comforting and consoling and easy to live up to. 
The new is bewitching, but baneful; it breeds dis- 
content, ennui, we can hardly ever live up to it. 
Blessed are those who live in the world they were 
born into. They are also damned, but that's not in 
their time. 

"Tradition," Keidansky continued musing aloud, 
"is far more beautiful than history, and even nature 
with all her charms has to be improved upon by art, 
by illusion. In the course of time science may build 
up some interesting superstitions, but meanwhile it 
is our poor debtor. It has filled the world with cold 
fad:s. It has emptied the heart of its fond fancies. 
And what do we really know, after all? The greatest 
philosopher of the age pauses and stands nonplussed 
before the Unknowable. The densest ignoramus in 
the world knows it all; knows all about the worlds 
beneath and beyond — their climates, inhabitants, 
populations, moral status, tortures and pleasures. 
What do we know, anyway ? Next to nothing, and we 
feel lonely and desolate and powerless after we have 
had everything explained to us. Orthodoxy, at least, 
gives us the consciousness of having some control in 
the universe ; it gives us a sense of shelter and of safe- 
ty. We know we have a kind of vote in the general 
management of things. We can accomplish some- 
thing by our prayers, by fasting. And when the fear- 
ful days come, the days in which the destiny of every 

87 



Discourses of Keidansky 

mortal for the coming year is determined on high, 
we ask for atonement, and fast and pour out our 
griefs in mournful prayers and burn candles for the 
dead. Our voices are heard on high, because we be- 
lieve they are, and our names are entered in the Book 
of Life for another year. Do not smile now, nor look 
so wise. All that is, is well, and whatever we believe 
in is true. The greatest sacrifice we made to science 
was our ignorance. 

" But whether it is this or that, there is something 
rooted so firmly and so unfathomably deep within 
us that calls and pulls us back to all that we have de- 
serted and tried to forget ; and when these hallowed 
days come, we can no longer drown our feelings. No 
matter how far I went in my radical conceptions — 
and I often went far enough to be excommunicated 
by my worthy brethren — no matter how iconoclas- 
tic we became, how absorbed we were in our abstrac- 
tions, and how fearlessly we theorized, the season of 
awe, beautiful, terrible awe, the judgment days drew 
near and hearts became heavy and the melody of the 
song of 'Kol Nidro* invaded our minds and shut 
out all the other music we ever heard in our lives. It 
is all a strain of music that, once heard, keeps sing- 
ing in our memories forever — this faith of our fa- 
thers. Go where we will, do what we may, the beauties 
of the old religion are with us yet and we cannot, we 
cannot forget. 

"Among the radicals of the New York Ghetto there 
is no more advanced nor brilliant man than is my 

88 



Days of Atonement 

friend Bahan. He has edited some of the best Jew- 
ish pubhcations; he has written much of what was 
best in them, and he was always on the side of free- 
thought and new ideas. Like myself, he belonged to 
the circles that had reformed Judaism altogether. He 
had not entered a synagogue for purposes of prayer 
since he left Russia as a youth, and that was many 
years ago. He is now on one of the best New York 
papers, and when Rosh Hashona and Yom Kippur 
arrive, he writes about these holidays so fervidly, 
feelingly, enthusiastically, with such tears in his eyes 
that one would think that these unsigned articles are 
the work of the most pious and orthodox Hebrew in 
New York. And, perhaps, they are too," Keidansky 
added, aside, "only if Bahan were accused of ortho- 
doxy he would protest his innocence." 
" That was years ago," my friend continued after a 
pause. " I was young, seeking new worlds to conquer, 
and so I fell into bad company — among people who 
think. They are mostly free-thinkers and free-talk- 
ers, and in the course of time my religion dwindled 
and I became as erratic as any of them. The worst 
thing about one who begins to think is that he also 
begins to talk. 1 began to talk, to voice my doubts 
and heresies, and soon the world, or at least my rela- 
tives, were against me. I kept on saying the most 
unsayable things, and when New Year's came I re- 
fused to go to the synagogue, because I had discov- 
ered the existence of the Unknowable. We quar- 
relled, and things came to such a pass that I left my 

89 



Discourses of Keidansky 

cousin's home, where 1 had been living, during the 
Days of Atonement. I knew what I knew and I was 
ready to make all sacrifices for the right of ranting 
and raving over the shameful superstitions in which 
humanity was steeped. The world was before me and 
so were all my troubles. But even when I refused to 
go to the synagogue, I was at heart of hearts exceed- 
ingly lonely without it, without the beautiful service 
of Rosh Hoshona. When the eve of Yom Kippur. 
came I did not know what to do with myself. Our 
circle of friends was to meet at the home of one of its 
members and spend the evening gayly and happily, 
though it was the sad and solemn Fast of Atone- 
ment. I had promised to come, and so, when all the 
inhabitants of the Ghetto were wending their way to 
their respe6tive houses of worship I started with a 
heavy heart to join my friends, glad that I had made 
the promise and sorry that I was keeping it. I ar- 
rived at my destination, a street in the West End 
Jewish quarter. When I neared the house I heard a 
loud, rather boisterous conversation going on. I rang 
the bell. Even as I did so I heard a number of shouts 
and loud peals of laughter. I did not wait for the door 
to open. I turned and walked away. I walked right on, 
not in the least knowing whither. Before I was barely 
aware of it, I was in Baldwin place, in front of the 
Beth Israel Synagogue. The cantor and his choir 
were just chanting the awe-inspiring, soul-stirring 
prayer of ' Kol Nidro,' that wonderful produ6t of 
the Spanish inquisition, written by a Morano dur- 

90 



Days of Atonement 

ing the darkest days of Israel and freighted with the 
sighs and cries and moans of a suffering people. 
Those strains of music brought me to my own life 
again. I entered the synagogue. I had come into my 
own. I felt such peace and consolation as I had not 
known for ever so long. 

" Do not ask me to explain it, I cannot. If the in- 
curability of religion could be explained it could also 
be cured. This is what happened, and this is what 
still happens to me from time to time. It may be 
strange, but mine is a government of, for, and by 
moods, and as they come and go I become every- 
thing that I have been and that I may be. 
" I Ve been greatly moved by many preachers and 
teachers and I have followed some of the most ad- 
vanced advocates of our time, the most universal 
universalists ; but let me hear one of the beautiful 
old chants, such as ' Kol Nidro,' or ' Unsana Tau- 
keff,' and I become a most zealous orthodox. Did 
I ever tell you about it ? 

"'Unsana Taukeff' is the most important prayer 
on the two days of Rosh Hoshona and the Day of 
Atonement. It is known as the ' Song of a Martyr 
in Israel ! ' The story of the prayer is one of the 
prettiest in Jewish folk tales. It is the song of Rabbi 
Amnon, who was the rabbi of Metz, in the days of 
Bishop Ercembud (1011-1017). Rabbi Amnon was 
of an illustrious family, of great personal merit, rich 
and respedted by Jew and Gentile alike. The bishop 
frequently pressed him to abjure Judaism and em- 

91 



Discourses of Keidansky 

brace Christianity, but without avail. It happened, 
however, on a certain day, being more closely pressed 
than usual and somewhat anxious to be rid of the 
bishop's importunities, he said hastily : ' I will con- 
sider the matter and give thee an answer in three 
days/ 

" As soon as he had left the bishop's presence, how- 
ever, his heart smote him and an uneasy conscience 
blamed him for having, even in the remotest man- 
ner, doubted his faith. He reached home over- 
whelmed with grief. Meat was set before him, but 
he refused to eat, and when his friends visited him 
he declined their proffered consolation, saying : ' I 
shall go down mourning to the grave.' 
" On the third day, while he was still lamenting his 
rash concession, the bishop sent for him, but he failed 
to answer the call. Finally the bishop's messengers 
seized him and brought him before the prelate by 
force. ' Let me pronounce my own doom for this 
negled:,' answered Amnon. ' Let my tongue, which 
uttered these doubting words, be cut out. It was a 
lie I uttered, for I never intended to consider that 
proposition.' 

" ^ Nay,' said the bishop, ' I will not cut out thy 
tongue, but thy feet, which refused to come to me, 
shall be cut off, and other parts of thine obstinate 
body shall also be tormented and punished.' 
" Under the bishop's eyes the toes and thumbs of 
Rabbi Amnon were then cut off, and after having 
been severely tortured he was sent home in a car- 

92 



Days of Atonement 

riage, his mangled members beside him. Rabbi Am- 
non bore all this with greatest resignation, firmly 
hoping and trusting that his earthly torment would 
plead his pardon with God. The days of awe came 
round while he was on his death bed, and he desired 
to be carried to the synagogue. He was conveyed to 
the house of God, and during the services he asked 
that he be permitted to utter a prayer. His words, 
which proved to be the last, given in English, are 
somewhat as follows : 

" ' I will declare the mighty holiness of this day, for 
it is awful and tremendous. Thy kingdom is exalted 
thereon ; Thy throne is established in mercy, and 
upon it Thou dost rest in truth. Thou art the judge 
who chastiseth, and from Thee naught may be con- 
cealed. Thou bearest witness, writest, sealest, re- 
cordest and rememberest all things, aye those which 
we imagine buried in the past. The Book of Records 
Thou openest ; the great sophor is sounded ; even 
the angels are terrified and they cry aloud : " The 
day of judgment dawns upon us," for in judgment 
they, the angels, are not faultless. 
"'All who have entered the world pass before Thee. 
Even as the shepherd causes the flock he numbers 
to pass under his crook, so Thou, O Lord, causest 
every living soul to pass before Thee. Thou number- 
est, thou visitest, appointing the limitations of every 
creature according to Thy judgment and Thy sen- 
tence. 
" ' On the New Year it is written, on the Day of 



Discourses of Keidansky 

Atonement it is sealed. Aye, all Thy decrees are re- 
corded ; who is to live and who is to die. The names 
of those who are to meet death by fire, by water, or 
by sword; through hunger, through thirst, and with 
the pestilence. All is recorded ; those who are to have 
tranquillity ; those who are to be disturbed ; those 
who are to be troubled ; those who are to be blessed 
with repose ; those who are to be prosperous; those 
for whom affliction is in store ; those who are to be- 
come rich, those who are to be poor ; who exalted, 
who cast down. But penitence, prayer and charity, 
O Lord, may avert all evil decrees.' 
" When he had finished this declaration. Rabbi Am- 
non expired, dying in God's house, among the as- 
sembled sons of Israel. 

" I can never forget these prayers, nor these days, 
go where I will, do what I may," Keidansky con- 
tinued. " Did you say something about free thought, 
the higher criticism, universal religion, the law of 
evolution, the study of comparative religion, the ab- 
surdity of superstition? Come, let us go over to yon- 
der house ; the cantor and his choir are now singing 
' Unsana Taukeff.' " 
And I followed him. 



94 



XI 

Why the World Is Growing Better 

THE world is growing better than it ever 
was before," said Keidansky; "we no 
longer practise what we preach." And be- 
fore I had time to recover from my surprise and utter 
any protest, he hastily continued in his exasperating 
manner : " We still believe in certain dod:rines, hold 
certain theories, advocate certain ideas, preach cer- 
tain gospels; but we feel different and a(5l much 
better when it comes to real life. We are far wiser in 
adjusting our adis to our ends, or rather our deeds 
are more wisely adjusted to our aims than we know. 
We do not desecrate these principles we entertain by 
putting them into practice. We don't feel like doing 
so. We let the abstractions float above us as vapor in 
the air. We have human instincts, good motives, 
noble longings, and our conduct is fairly decent in 
spite of our conflicting codes. 

"From a thousand pulpits we are told to do this, 
that, and the other ; a thousand theories would divide 
our paths in life; a thousand methods of salvation 
are presented to us by the only and original author- 
ized agents from on high; but our humanity makes 
us all akin, our instin(5ts guide us and our yearnings 
lure us all the same way to perdition and to happi- 
ness ; and we follow after and pave the way for the 
ideal world. How widely, vastly different our relig- 

95 



Discourses of Keidansky 

ious and moral beliefs and our abstradions are. And 
yet, how nearly alike, how similarly we all ad and 
perform our parts in the world's work. We still dif- 
fer, dispute and debate over the future, the trend and 
ultimate aim of things ; but we no longer allow these 
differences to prevent us from acting in unison and 
harmony in all things that are conducive to our bet- 
ter development and chief good. A dozen men can- 
not agree upon a Church, so they form another trust ; 
and, aiding the industrial growth of the country, they 
work out their own salvation, and in the course of 
time endow colleges and build mansions and pay 
fabulous sums for great paintings, and even feed the 
beggars that live on theology. These men agree on 
one thing, and that is most important of all. 
"As I said, we still listen to and believe in many of 
the crude, incongruous and misty creeds that are 
preached to us, but we walk upon more solid ground 
when it comes to life, and all that we want to make 
of it — which is the most possible. We build wiser 
than we know, and we disobey the preachers because 
we can rise above them, do better, and put their ad- 
vice to shame. Have we discarded the book? Well, 
we have followed life ; and see, this world is quite in- 
habitable now. That we differ in theology, on le- 
gends, myths, is a trifle, but that we agree on the 
education of the young, hygiene, athletic exercise, 
morning walks, cold baths, pure diet, music, pic- 
tures: that we agree on the value of all these things 
makes the game worth the candle. 

96 



Why the World Is Growing Better 

"For instance, we are perpetually urged to, and we 
half believe it best to, renounce the world, the flesh, 
and the devil, forfeit all the joys of life, and join the 
Society for the Prevention of Any thing ; but in adtu- 
ality, we are all strenuously engaged in capturing 
the world, in gratifying the flesh and in getting as 
much devil into us as is possible in the pitifully brief 
span of this short life. This is absolutely necessary. 
The more devil within us the better. A man with no 
devil in him will not go to heaven, or any other 
pleasurable resort. By doing and daring and devil- 
ing we become strong, and if the world is better to- 
day than it ever was before, which it certainly is, it is 
because we no longer practise what we preach — have 
nearly always practised better. If man did not do 
things, and do them so much better, sermons would 
never become obsolete; but as it is, loads of them 
have to be dumped in some swamp every little 
while. 

"We have also been advised as to the beautiful vir- 
tues of humility, meekness, timidity, obedience, sub- 
mission, self-effacement, self-suppression, wiping 
yourself off^ the face of the earth with benzine and a 
rag, and we have believed in the advice, but fortu- 
nately only believed ; for a voice from within prompt- 
ed us to feel and be diff^erent and do more wisely. So 
we cultivated haughtiness, pride, aggressiveness, 
have given free play to our physical and spiritual 
forces, have become conscious of our powers, and 
more powerful still, and the phantom of freedom 

97 



Discourses of Keidansky 

is becoming a fad: and the world is growing fair. 
We walk with our heads ered: nowadays, no matter 
what conception we have in our minds. We have be- 
come so arrogant that we even question the divine 
right of bishops and policemen. We take off our hats 
for nothing, known or unknown. No matter what 
we believe, we feel that obsequiousness is the most 
disgraceful word in the dictionary. Then we are be- 
coming so self-appreciative and selfish that we re- 
fuse to let others save us. The salvation of a soul is 
a rather delicate matter, and it cannot be done at 
short order while you wait, by all those whose adver- 
tisements we have read. It is not quite so easy a 
matter as it is tofindawatchmaker to put your time- 
piece into good repair. In fad, we are growing so 
egoistic that we want to do it ourselves. We no long- 
er want any mark-down bargains, such as salvation 
for a prayer, a fish dinner or ninety-eight cents in 
charity. We feel the fraud of bribing our way into 
heaven. Those are cheated most who get their things 
cheaply. It is the height of impudence and imbecil- 
ity to think that putting on a long face, or some 
other ad of piety or penance, will change your des- 
tiny, and incidentally, the course of the universe. At 
least, we feel that these things are wrong, no matter 
what we think. Life or death or immortality, a man 
must pay his rent. Everything has its price. What 
you get for nothing is worth the same. The theologi- 
cal bargains will not wear well at all. You must pay 
honestly and fairly for everything you receive, and 

98 



Why the World Is Growing Better 

for all you become. What we procure for nothing 
is not worth while. We are only cheating ourselves 
miserably when we attempt to get what is best 
through bribes and pass through the gates on false 
pretences. Whatever we have been told, we feel that 
we cannot follow the newspaper advertisements in 
these things and buy redemption at closing-out bar- 
gain sales. No one can grow for another, no one can 
acquire, no one can become for another, no one can 
be saved by proxy or buy salvation. Each must 
work and suffer and struggle his way up. 
" I see that you are a little incredulous about these 
things," he said, after a short silence. "Do you find 
it hard to follow me ? I know exactly what I mean, 
only the difficulty lies in making you see it as I do. 
No; don't be in haste. Let 's walk a little more. I 
am afraid your education is being sadly neglected; I 
have n't talked at you for some time. No ; I never 
hasten. Whenever I am in a great hurry to get to a 
place of the most urgent necessity I walk into a sec- 
ond-hand book store, like those on Fourth avenue, 
and look at the titles and read the prefaces of old and 
odd volumes. Never mind the swarming, surging, 
scurrying crowds. They are attending to the world's 
business, and make it possible for me to be idle and 
look on. 

" Butwhat I was driving at is this : That there is one 
life and many theories of it, that most of these theo- 
ries are a disgrace even to Sunday schools, that it 's 
all hitting the nail on the finger. While these theo- 

99 
LofC. 



Discourses of Keidansky 

ries would have us go by various little walks and by- 
ways and lanes and alleys, life prompts us to take to 
the open road that leads to strength and happiness. 
While these theories would have us thwart and stifle 
and starve our desires, life forces us to give them full 
play in spite of all conventions and creeds, and the 
result is civilization and all its blessings. Way down 
into the recesses of our souls we are so deeply relig- 
ious that we all do better than we believe. 
"Take three children of different birth; send them 
to three different schools, instrud: them in three dif- 
ferent religions, and then, will they not, when they 
grow up, work and aim and struggle and trade and 
worry and aspire and get dyspepsia — in short, live 
and die in very much the same way, and more or less 
fairly and squarely ? Inasmuch as their morals will 
be useful, will they not be of the same brand? Will 
they not do better than they respectively believe ? 
There are other illustrations. The leading orthodox 
rabbi of this city naturally believes in the restoration 
of Palestine, the regeneration of Judaism, the resur- 
rection of the Hebrew language, and the resuscita- 
tion of many things long dead and passed away. In 
his speeches he is a most ardent advocate of the re- 
vival of Hebrew lore, the essence of all wisdom ac- 
cording to him, and the greatest of all tongues, the 
Hebrew language, which revival, he avers, is the 
most radiant promise of Zionism. The negledt of 
the ancient lore in this country is his most woful re- 
gret. But his own son he sends to Harvard for a 

lOO 



Why the JVorld Is Growing Better 

modern education, and the son will become a man 
of the world and a useful, valuable member of soci- 
ety because his father did better than he believed. 
" 'A year hence in Jerusalem/ cries the pious He- 
brew at the close of his holiday prayer, and then, as 
soon as the festival is over he buys himself a little 
house, pays J 800 down, raises two mortgages and, 
trusting in God, he hopes to pay up the entire sum 
in about ten years, and he and his family are happier 
and this country is richer and better for their being 
here. ' A year hence in Jerusalem,' and here we are 
doing what we can for our own good and for the 
good of whatever country we abide in, and all of us 
are well because we ad: better than we preach and 
believe. Most of us believed in the colonization of 
Palestine when we were way back in Russia, yet we 
came over here feeling that this is the new promised 
land. Palestine may be a good place for the old to 
die in, if the superstition is true that the worms will 
not touch your corpse there, but 1 don't think it is 
a promising country for the young to live in. The 
land that was once flowing with milk and honey now 
lacks water. No, I don't know in what part of New 
York they make the Passover wine that they bring 
from Palestine. 

" I am somewhat of a Zionist myself, as you know, 
but as soon as I can afford it, as soon as my Yiddish 
play is produced and the New York critics condemn 
it to a financial success, I will send for my little 
brother to come from Russia to this country, and as 

lOI 



Discourses of Keidansky 

there is no genius in our family, I am sure he will 
do very well here. Yet I believe in the restoration 
of Palestine, and so long as the Zionists permit me 
to live in this country I am wiUing to support their 
movement. 

" And, let 's see, there 's something else. I want to 
fix you up so that you will never again come to me 
with that hackneyed plaint that the world is going 
to the dogs because we do not practise what we 
preach. We have laws and we all preach against in- 
termarriage, do we not? We all condemn the inter- 
marriage of Jew and Christian, of Protestant and 
Catholic, of chorus girl and rich college student, of 
an adress and a minister; we prohibit these things 
and perhaps rightly, and yet — " 
" And yet ? " I asked anxiously. 
" Do not be alarmed," he answered quickly; " I am 
not going to advocate intermarriage or assimilation. 
By this time you will, perhaps, have gathered from 
what I said that I do not much believe in measures 
that have to be advocated; rather do I favor the 
things that heart and soul prompt us to do, what- 
ever our beliefs and theories and in spite of them. 
The advocacy of a thing, or the supposed necessity 
of advocating a certain measure, proves the useless- 
ness, untimeliness and futility of it. It is hardly wise 
to advocate anything. Things must be brought 
about by conditions to be of vital import. Least of 
all should any one ever advocate intermarriage, and 
yet, and yet — do you remember these lines? 

I02 



W^hy the W^orld Is Growing Better 

" ' ^wo shall be born the whole wide world apart ^ 
And speak in different tongues and have no thought 
Each of the other s being, and no heed. 
And these over unknown seas to unknown lands 
Shall cross, escaping wreck, defying death. 
And all unconsciously shape every a5l 
And bend each wandering step to this one end, 
T'hat one day, out of darkness they shall meet 
And read life's meaning in each other s eyes,* 

" Yes/* he concluded, as we were about to part, " the 
world is growing better than it ever was before — and 
it is n't because we have a more efficient police force 
either/' 



103 



XII 

HomCy the Last Resort 

"^ I ^HERE is no place like home," said Kei- 
I dansky, " and there 's nothing like run- 
A ning away from it." 
"What is the matter with the home?" I asked. 
"Nothing," he answered, "except that very often 
everything is. You are surprised ? " he continued. 
" That *s promising. Somehow when I see you 
shocked it makes me feel as if I am saying some- 
thing, and I am encouraged to go on. What do I 
mean? Just this: 

" There is no place that is so small, petty and narrow 
as the home is; there is no place so close, cramped 
and crowded ; so limited, restricted and tape-meas- 
ured. There 's no place where there is such agree- 
ment, unity and uniformity ; where there is so much 
subordination, subjection and cooppression — if you 
will pardon the coiningof a word — as in the home; 
no place where there is such conformity of opinion, 
speech and a6tion; where there is so much depend- 
ence, inter-dependence and inter-domination ; where 
so much good advice is given you, so many high ex- 
amples set up and so many paragons of perfedion 
presented to you ; no place where there *s so much up- 
holding of old standards and so little scope for build- 
ing new ones ; where respedtability is regarded with 
such reverence and the neighbors' say held so sa- 

105 



Discourses of Keidansky 

cred; no place so lacking initiative, so barren of 
originality J so devoid of daring — no place where you 
are so tenderly cared for, so kindly comforted, so 
closely watched, and so grossly misunderstood as the 
home. It is the most dangerous place in the world. 
" No, do not interrupt me — I know just what you 
are going to say. Let me state it for you — while I 
am at it. What I said is blasphemy, of course, and 
what you want to say is that the home is the garden 
where all our virtues flower and bloom ; that it is the 
foundation of our morals, the birthplace of our high- 
est ideals, the great charadler-builder, the school of 
patriotism, the source of true religion, the protestor 
of our national life, the benign soul-uplifter, the place 
where goodness and purity flourish, and the place 
where the best principles are manufactured. I know 
just what you are going to say because I, too, have 
heard some sermons and have read some after-din- 
ner speeches in my life. And I do not say that these 
utterances are altogether misleading. There is some 
good, I doubt not, in a sermon and some shadow of 
truth even in an after-dinner speech. But because the 
home has ever been the subjed: of indiscriminate en- 
comiums and pufly panegyrics, no one has ever dared 
to say anything against it. It has not been treated as 
a human institution, and so many crimes have been 
committed in its good name. It is because these beau- 
tiful things about it are, or are supposed to be, that 
so many of us have been sentenced to stay home 
without a proper trial. 

1 06 



Homey the Last Resort 

" Granting even that the halo is not hollow and that 
home is the ideal place it is pidlured to be, the admis- 
sion is perhaps the strongest argument against it and 
for running away from it; for, in that case, the home 
is almost too good a place to stay in, too tame and 
agreeable, a nest of the neutral, a triumph of the 
negative, maybe, and hardly a place where you can 
grow, learn, enlarge and expand distindly and in 
your own way. I fear me that in any case home is 
about the last resort where one can express his indi- 
viduality and become fully equipped to grapple with 
the world and those who own it. Do not misunder- 
stand me. No one intends to wage wanton war 
against that which is held in reverence. 
" The radical is only ahead of time because all the 
others are behind it. No one wishes to abolish 
merely for the sake of abolition. There is no satis- 
fadion in mere annihilation. No one wishes it. Wis- 
dom and folly have the same intention. To say that 
the most destrudtive radical and the most orthodox 
conservative are in perfect agreement as far as their 
aim is concerned will be dangerously near uttering a 
commonplace. Both seek well-being and happiness. 
There was a time when there was a little difference 
between the two; when one of the two parties wanted 
to postpone that welfare unto another life ; but now, 
in this hasty age, both demand all that it is possible 
to procure here and now. There may be difference 
of opinion, but there is no difference of intention. 
The objed: of all is to preserve the virility of our be- 

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Discourses of Keidansky 

ing, the veracity of soul, the strength to do and to 
be. There may be a question as to my being a con- 
servative, but there is no doubt that I am a conser- 
vator. I would conserve everything that is conducive 
to growth and happiness. What I believe, what I 
say, has this objedt in view. And having this in view, 
I realize that in the course of human events it ever 
and anon becomes necessary to demolish the divini- 
ties that be. 

" If I seem to attack this sacred institution it is be- 
cause it has a very seamy, sore and searing side to it. 
In the first place there are usually parents at home. 
What a pity that parents and children cannot be of 
the same age; that there cannot be some under- 
standing between them. What a sorrow that those 
who brought us into the world should have no sym- 
pathy with us — that those whom we love most 
should understand us least ; that there should be 
such conflicting contrasts in feeling, in thought, in 
temperaments and tendencies. But regrets do not 
alter circumstances. They exist and they are obdu- 
rate. The old look backward : the young look for- 
ward. The old have become hardened, inured to 
things and indifferent : to the young this is the great- 
est danger. The old are relics of the past; the young 
are the hopeful heirs of the future. To the former 
life is a lost game, to the latter it is a beautiful dream. 
The old stand with their backs to the rising sun, 
with their faces towards their graves ; they belong to 
a dying world and — the pity of it! — they would 

io8 



HomCj the Last Resort 

shape the destinies of those who belong to the glo- 
rious future ; they would make the children prema- 
turely wise and deprive them of most of the fun in 
life and all the benefits that come from folly, error 
and indiscretion. Age would convince youth that life 
is real and earnest and a practical business — which 
is not true in the case of youth — and should not be. 
There is constant disagreement, or agreement — 
which is often worse, for it implies submission of the 
weaker party. The freedom of the young is ever cur- 
tailed. The home is often their prison. Youth and 
age is a bad match, and that 's the disadvantage of 
home. See this moonlight; it is beautiful, is it not? 
But a flower must have sunshine in which to bloom. 
All resped: for age : but youth must have freedom. 
"I hope this is not true of many phases of life ; but 
I am thinking now of a condition in the Ghetto that 
creates appalling misery, a condition that makes the 
home a most desirable place — to run away from. Be- 
tween the Jewish children, who have acquired their 
uplifting education here in American schools and 
their parents, who have brought their ignorance and 
fanaticism over from Russia — where the despotism 
of the throne and the tyranny of the Torah have 
united in making the densest, darkest Ghettos — 
between these children and parents there is a differ- 
ence in time and progress of several hundred years. 
I would like to pause here and tell you about the 
Jewish religion — how it has enlightened the world 
and darkened the life of the Jews, victims of fatal fa- 

109 



Discourses of Keidansky 

naticism ; how the world has accepted the spirit of 
Judaism in various forms and to its benefit, and the 
Jews have remained bound by a thousand rigid rit- 
uals, iron precepts, meaningless stuff about ' pots 
and pans,* to their awful detriment — how they per- 
secuted themselves when they could get no Chris- 
tian nation to do it for them — but there 's no time 
to talk about these things now ; besides, I want to get 
back to the home. So many things occur to me and 
I do not know what to say first. Write about it? Per- 
haps, some day. It may be that I, too, have been 
cursed to live by the sweat of my pen, but oh — I 
hate to write. Besides, what 's the use P It is too late 
to convert my people to Judaism, now. 
" But what I mentioned before shows a pronounced 
phase of misunderstanding, estrangement and di- 
vision between children and parents, also a good il- 
lustration of the bad, narrow, uncongenial home. 
" Under any circumstances the old and the young 
are out of joint ; but here the clashing of interests is 
so accentuated that the condition is heart-tearing. 
There are parents, crude, careless, callous, often es- 
sentially material, mercenary, miserly, whose only 
mental occupation is their blind, outlived fatalistic 
faith ; they are Russian products, and they cannot 
follow, cannot comprehend their Americanized, in- 
telligent, idealistic and aspiring boys and girls ; they 
follow them, but blindly, praise or blame indiscrim- 
inately ; they cannot appreciate the many and noble 
longings of these youths. No sympathy and the 

no 



Homey the Last Resort 

home stiflingly small. Yes, they love each other, if 
there can be any love without resped: and under- 
standing. These bright boys and girls that you meet 
in the Ghetto, and who do so much towards the edu- 
cation of slum students and settlement workers — 
they are what they are, not because, but rather in 
spite of, their parents. They struggle and strive up- 
ward alone and unaided, and also ad: as missionaries 
of civilization in their homes. They beautify their 
little rooms with pidures and books and trifles of 
art, and they play sweet music — but what is the use, 
I ask you, of a thought, a work of art, a poem, a 
piece, of music, if you cannot share it with those who 
are near and, somehow, are dear to you. What is the 
use of these things if you cannot share them with 
some one.? And what is to be done when there is no 
response at home ? These children are so lonely in 
their sorrows and in their joys, and the home is so 
compressed, so 'kleinlich,' so ' eng * (only these 
German words can give my meaning). How terrible 
to see the grandeur of the universe and have no one 
to tell it to! How awful this yawning gulf in the 
Ghetto ! If I say harsh and bitter things it is be- 
cause I have looked into it and seen an appalling 
spedacle of crushed hearts, broken spirits, blighted 
hopes, ruined lives, thwarted beings and stifled 
souls. I have looked into the gulf, and this is why I 
want to jest about the holiest things in the world. 
"Butspeakinggenerally,homeis a dangerous place, 
and he was a wise sea captain who bribed his son 

III 



Discourses of Keidansky 

— clandestinely gave him I50 — to run away from 
home. While away the youth will come in contad: 
with realities, learn what the world is, what it de- 
mands, and finally become big enough to build his 
own home. Or, he will come back to be, at last, 
understood and resped:ed. But let him go forth. 
He will find everywhere pie that will give him 
dyspepsia as badly as that which mother used to 
make. 

"As it is, the home covers a multitude of sins. It is 
very faulty, and, above all, it lacks persped:ive. The 
persons within it are not seen in the proper light. 
They are either underestimated or overjudged. 
Home is either a mutual admiration, or a mutual 
mutilation, society. Close as the home is there is ever 
plenty of room for prejudice and illusion. The lights 
in which things are seen are artificial — and so are 
the subje6ts. If the child is a mediocrity, has gradu- 
ated atthe head of his class and is a veritable phono- 
graph for remembering fa6ls, he is at once regarded 
as a genius and not a little time and effort is wasted 
on him, and he is sent forth to bore and prey upon 
an innocent world ; but if he have real talent and show 
it before any one has had time to decide that he has 
it, his wings are clipped immediately and he is forth- 
with cast down and discouraged. But there is always 
enough appreciation of talent to discover a medi- 
ocrity. Home is the nest of nefarious nepotism, and 
between that and disparaging prejudice, countless 
youths go to the devil. The home judgments as to 

1 12 



HomCy the Last Resort 

capacities, aptitudes and abilities are tremendous. 
If a boy is color-blind, he is born to be a painter ; if 
he has no sense of proportion, why architecture is 
his sphere ; if he stammers, he is placed upon a chair, 
made to recite pieces, and hailed as the coming ora- 
tor ; if he is a little bit hard of hearing, they dedi- 
cate his life to music; if he has absolutely no imagi- 
nation, they say history is his field ; they try to make 
a lawyer of him when he has a wonderful proclivity 
for telling the truth, a merchant when he has a fine 
sense of honesty — and, by heaven, they want to 
make a minister of a fellow who has a sense of humor ! 
One must leave home to find what he can do; and 
then do it; and then come back and do what one can 
for the education and welfare of his parents. Leave 
your home that you may suflFer hardships and learn, 
and then come back to cheer the old folks up. For- 
give them for what they have done to you with their 
sincerity and devotion — and build your own home. 
But run away for awhile if you would grow. It is too 
narrow and the atmosphere is not healthy. There is 
ever disparagement, disagreement and fatal favorit- 
ism. No son ever walked in the ways of his father ; 
no father ever wanted him to do otherwise. There is 
always some one at home who knows what is best for 
you, only you don't want to mind. But, oh, the tyr- 
anny of tears, the despotism of tender words, and 
the fearful sincerity of the intentions to do you good! 
All inquisitors have been sincere. There is no need 
of arguing that there is something radically wrong 

113 



Discourses of Keidansky 

with the average home. Conditions prove it. We are, 
most of us, running away from home to get ac- 
quainted with things as they are — running away to 
the tune of ' Home, Sweet Home.' Even as we 
hum the sweet melody, we go forth into hfe to get 
some education, make our fortunes, and build our 
own homes. Do you remember ' Die Heimath,' and 
how Magdais tortured by home and loving parents? 
It 's the same argument that Sudermann presented 
in this play, and again, in ' Die Ehre,* he showed us 
phases of the home." 

There was silence for a space, and then Keidansky 
continued:" Homes of a thousand tender memories 
clustering from the cradle up through all the paths 
of life ; homes of kind deeds and unforgotten words; 
homeswhereinloveand freedom arewedded, where- 
in the most beautiful dreams are born ; homes 
wherein folks look into each other's eyes and un- 
derstand, wherein there are no clouds of suspicion 
and misunderstanding, and each one is taken at his 
worth; homes unblighted by cold wisdom, wherein 
the old are young and the young are old — I have 
heard — I have read — of such homes." 
The pale moonlight streamed into the open window 
of the attic. The disorderly piles of books, heaps of 
old papers and magazines, the queer little pictures 
about the walls, the small table with a confusion of 
all things mentionable upon it — all these presented 
a strange picture in this dimness. Keidansky sat on 
his bed, his head leaning against the inclined ceiling. 

114 



Homey the Last Resort 

It was this sense of home and comfort that prompted 

his remarks on the subjed:. In the dusk the faces in 

the little pictures seemed to listen attentively and 

change expression as he talked so fervidly. I sat in 

the only chair in the room — thinking, wondering. 

I felt pensive. 

" An extreme view, eh ? '* my friend asked after a- 

while, and he answered : " Perhaps it is. 

" And that reminds me," he added, " that you once 

said that my apparent mission in life is to throw 

stones. Well, granting that it is, who shall say that 

my task is not as important as any ? " 

And I, drowsily, absently, also asked, " Who shall 

say r 



"5 



XIII 

A yewish yester 

THEY were telling stories of Motke Cha- 
bad, the jester, who many years ago lived, 
moved and had his joke on everybody in 
the city of Wilna, where he was well known (but not 
so well liked) as the troublesome town clown. After 
nearly everybody in one group at Zarling's had 
contributed a Chabad yarn to the general entertain- 
ment, the question arose as to whether there ever 
really existed such a personage as the redoubtable 
Motke. He had said and done so many impossible 
things that it became a matter of wonder whether he 
had said and done them at all. So daring were his 
utterances, so strange his adventures, his queer 
pranks so preposterous, that he was considered by 
some to be an imaginary chara6ler. He possessed 
those vices of individuality which art raises to the 
dignity of virtues. He had become a tradition, and 
so a matter of doubt and speculation. This last was 
clear at our discussion. The poet suggested that, 
whether Motke ever existed or not, he was certainly 
a great humorist. But even this did not satisfy us. 
We were bent upon investigation. The medical stu- 
dent made a motion that we ask Zarling, who is a 
native of Wilna and at least has known some one 
who knew Chabad; but here Keidansky protested. 
"Do not ask any one," he said, "who has known, or 

117 



Discourses of Keidanshy 

known of, him closely ; his description would be too 
familiar, intimate, personal, and it would mar and 
discolor the halo that tradition had cast about him. 
No, do not ask the Czar, for he knows too much 
about him and those who were near our hero never 
understood his significance. You must have perspec- 
tive to see the picturesque, even as you must be a 
poet to see that which does not exist. It is only for 
the blind that an eye-witness can write history. Ar- 
tistically speaking, the closer you get to life the less 
you know about it. Realism fails because it takes 
the existence of reality for granted. Because it be- 
comes systematic and too sure of its subject. Those 
who have known, those who have touched elbows 
with Chabad or his brother^s grandchildren, will be 
accurate, but not truthful. To describe a person truly, 
one must include all its infinite possibilities of failure 
or success — what he might have been, what he 
longed to be, what he could not be with his given 
conditions, what he was not, what he was believed to 
be, etc., and he who has decided all about the exad: 
measure of a person cannot fathom his possibilities. 
We are all so sure of the conditions of contempo- 
rary life that it will take a succeeding generation to 
know all about it. 

" And I am not trying to hinder the work of this 
investigation, because it may prove the non-exist- 
ence of Chabad. That would not matter in the least, 
for the anecdotes and tales that are being circulated 
in his name, and his storied misadventures and 

ii8 



A yewish y ester 

gloried misdeeds create him in fancy and he exists 
in imagination — which is all that is necessary for 
one desiring to point out the benign and malignant 
work of the scoffer. But he did exist, so we are told 
by those who have known some one who knew him 
intimately. He did exist, because, while we have su- 
perfluous virtues to attribute to all sorts of saints 
who did live, we have not a superfluity of humor 
to ascribe to one who has never been. Some one 
must have given birth to these things which we can 
all admire but could not create. Some one must 
have been witty enough to think these things, and 
reckless enough to say them. We all have the con- 
victions, but he had the courage, and that was long 
ago. 

" He did exist, this beggar, braggart, buffoon, town- 
gossip, dealer in wind and old clothes, match-maker, 
man of all occupations and no means of existence, 
practical joker and general jester of the Ghetto of 
Wilna; for such he was and as such he did his good 
work. He was an outcast, and as such he ministered 
to the sanity of society that hath cast him out, and 
kept it from going to the extremes of stupidity. For 
so it is; the outcast reduces respedtability to the 
ridiculous ; the criminal points to the futility of the 
law ; the rascal shows the relativity of right ; the in- 
fidel reforms and enlarges our religion ; the enemy 
of order advances our progress ; the earthly materi- 
alist proves the baselessness of all our idealisms ; 
the ascetic demonstrates the stupidity of excess ; the 

119 



Discourses of Keidanshy 

prohibitionist drives us to drink ; the strongest ac- 
cusation convid:s the accuser; the plaint of the pes- 
simist makes life interesting ; the tyrant gives the 
greatest lesson in freedom ; men write books to prove 
what fools they are, and the jester suggests what a 
tragic farce it all is. So many efforts in life, life itself 
defeats its own purpose. It is the undesired that 
happens. Help comes not from heaven because we 
exped: it from that source. They who break laws to 
suit their own convenience make larger laws for the 
welfare of society. I told you before that the out- 
casts of society are often its saviors. 
" Now be in order, gentlemen. I have the floor this 
time. This is my chance to get killed. Not to the 
point ? But there are many points to this, and if I have 
deviated from one I was only getting so much nearer 
the other. I was tryingto show what good this scoffer 
and sycophant has done, and to point out the value 
of the jest. God created the world and he saw what 
he was *up against,' so he smiled, and thus humor 
was born. After awhile the divine flashlights from on 
high began to play hide-and-seek in the unlit cham- 
bers of the human brain ; men became possessed of 
the sense of humor, and this was the awakening and 
dawn of civilization. The lightnings of the mind 
which suddenly reveal the multitudinous contradic- 
tions of life, the mental illuminations which cause 
the immediate recognition of the incongruous, the 
flash which makes you see all in a moment, the wide 
view which makes the universe as small as the lan- 



I20 



A Jewish y ester 

tern in your hand, the whimsicality of thought for- 
ever creating unsuspected analogies and unexpedled 
comparisons, the sense of proportion which reduces 
all things to what they are, or should be, truth seen 
through the falsehoods, the sureties discovered 
through the absurdities, the exadlness of things 
measured through their exaggerations, miracles of 
instantaneous reasoning and feats of ingenious de- 
ductions, the intelledual rapid transit between the 
sublime and the ridiculous, which keeps you from 
going to either extreme, the magic charm which keeps 
you above the abysses of the stupid, small and great, 
the bright footlights to the tragedy of life — such, in 
brief, is humor. And what else is there that is so 
powerful to prevent extravagances, to check excess- 
es, to arrest all sorts of frenzies, to curtail abnormal 
credulity, to sober all kinds of intoxications ? In the 
Ghetto, as everywhere else, humor is the saving 
presence; it makes existencetolerable,andpreserves 
the sanity of the little journey to the grave. It was 
dark and dismal and dreary and dingy in the Russian 
Ghettos, and life had the color of last year's snow, 
and it all seemed like a funeral procession in a sul- 
try, rainy weather ; from without we were harassed 
by our enemies ; from within we were harried by our 
friends, our guardians of sacred law and traditional 
superstition; it was sad and sorrowful, and so we 
jested. God sent us some sunshine in the form of 
such scoffers and outcasts as Motke Chabad, and we 
laughed. We laughed and forgot to weep. Humor 

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Discourses of Keidansky 

is essentially pathetic, but the absence of it is tragic. 
Did we not laugh a little we could not have lived. 
Humor, my friends, is the redeeming grace. If you 
have ever been very serious in life, why, you can 
laugh it down. What shall we do to be saved ? Cul- 
tivate a sense of humor. 

"How could we have lived it through without a 
Chabad? With a smug, smooth, sullen, soulless re- 
spedlability that moves along the lines of least dar- 
ing and most obedience, that cannot do any good 
because it must fulfil the 'Taryag Mitzves — the 313 
precepts — that commit all sorts of prescribed fol- 
lies on earth to be admitted into heaven, that di- 
vides its time between praying in the synagogue 
three times a day and preying upon its less fortu- 
nate neighbors the rest of the time, with a mob of 
skull-capped numskulls that did not think because 
its mind was made up — has been made up for it cen- 
turies ago — a crowd that would not move an inch 
because, as is insisted, 'the hell that was good enough 
for our fathers, is good enough for us ' — with a class 
of good people like that, how should we have fared 
if we had not had a Motke to chastise it with his jests 
and jeers and sneers and arrows of scorn .f* He 
laughed with the lowly and for them; he was on the 
side of reason as against precept; he stood for natu- 
ral needs as against supernatural suppositions ; he was 
oneof theunder-dogs,but he barked loudly for their 
cause, and his service shall not be forgotten as long 
as we have a sense of humour left — as long as we are 

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A yewish y ester 

human! Crude were his jests, and clownish most of 
his jokes; did he have the talent of a Heine or 
Biirne, he could not be what they were without 
theii possibilities; he was a rough-hewn, Ghetto- 
enclosed child of darkness, but he did his work in 
his own way, and the work told the story. 
"God has spoiled his chosen people by choosing 
them. Many of them are stiff-necked, stubborn, re- 
adlionary ; and they do countless things in the name 
that would not countenance it. As often as not the 
powers that be in Jewish communities are haughty, 
proud, unjustly aggressive, and they prey upon and 
oppress the humbler children of Israel. It is well 
that there should ever be some one constantly to 
criticise, castigate, scold, and Carlyle these powers 
that be and guard and interpret the law. So, in a 
sense, every good Jew should be an anti-Semite. 
Fie should beware of the abuses of organized bu- 
reaucracy by leaders of the community. He should 
be opposed to the inimical doings of the united 
many. United action is seldom good action. The in- 
dividual should look out for the crowd. In organi- 
zation, every one gives up part of his soul, and so 
even organized religions are soulless. So let the good 
Jew keep an eye on what the leaders in Judaism are 
doing, and to make sure that he is right, let him put 
his ear to the ground and listen to the voice of the 
rejected prophet and blasphemous jester. 
" Many stories of Chabad have been told, but a few 
things may be mentioned to help me out of my poor 

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Discourses of Keidansky 

plight, to illustrate my meaning. Thus, once upon a 
stormy day, when the rain and thunder and light- 
ning became fearful and awesome, Motke was seen 
running through a street of Wilna, at his greatest 
possible speed, frantically waving his hands. A few 
Jews witnessing this, and overtaking him, stopped 
him, demanding what the trouble was. ' Such terrible 
thunder and lightning,' said he, all out of breath; *I 
fear me that the Almighty is about to give us a new 
Law!* Here is a blessed bit of blasphemy which 
strikingly voices the protest of a law-entangled, rit- 
ual-ridden, tradition-tied people against the grind- 
ing yoke of the Torah. There is a story by another 
Ghetto jester, driving at the same evil. There came 
a time once — so the story runs — when the chil- 
dren of Israel became weary of this heavy yoke, 
when they could no longer live up to the laws forced 
upon them amid the dramatic cfFe6ls of Sinai, when 
they could no longer bear all the sufferings and per- 
secutions that living up to these laws entailed, and 
they prayed to God that they might be delivered 
from the Law, that they might be permitted to re- 
turn to him the Tables of Stone; and the Upper- 
most consented to take it all back; and so, upon a 
day, the Jews from all corners of the earth started 
on a journey toward Mount Sinai, with heavy-laden 
trains and ships and caravans of crolls and Biblical 
Commentaries. They came from all parts of the 
world — from East and West, North and South, 
from the Occident and the Orient; there were all 

124 



A yewish y ester 

manner of Jews, and they came by all means of 
transportation, but they all labored painfully under 
their tremendous loads, which they brought to be 
returned. At Sinai, they were to give up their bur- 
dens. Arrived there, they piled up their great packs 
of 'precept upon precept' around the holy eleva- 
tion, until their luggage formed a mountain larger 
than Sinai. When the Uppermost appeared in his 
invisible, yet blinding glory, he asked for the mean- 
ing of this huge mountain of books, and the Jews, 
with their faces to the ground, cried, ' It is the Law. 
Take it, O Lord.' The Lord — so runs the story — 
was astonished at this, and he told the chosen peo- 
ple that only ten simple rules of living had been 
given to them at Sinai. He knew nothing of all 
these volumes. These multitudes of laws and end- 
less commentaries were of men's making, not of his 
giving. They were empty vaporings of idle brains. 
He refused to take the Law back in its present 
form. So the Jews journeyed to their respedlive 
homes in all parts of the world, wiser, if not re- 
lieved of their burdens. I was irresistibly reminded 
of this story, and could not help telling it. It is the 
produd: of a far more subtle brain than Chabad's 
was. I do not remember the name of the author 
now, but he and Chabad unwittingly worked for 
the same cause." 

A boisterous group of" dancing-school fellows," as 
"the intelle6tuals " called them, entered the place, 
demanding, at the point of their pay, something to 

I2S 



Discourses of Keidansky 

eat. Keidansky's audience became restless. But he 
persistently kept on, despite all kinds of interrup- 
tions. 

*' Religion, as you all know, is the absence of the 
sense of humor," he said. "It goes to all sorts of 
absurd extremes. Its tower commands but one view 
of life, and that view is marred by emotion. When 
faith is not blind, it is, at least, short-sighted. The 
loyal member of the sed: is not a seer. Enthusiasts 
are painfully one-sided. They see, or rather they 
feel, but one side. All their glances are on one 
thing. So we need the man with humor, who can 
see all things in one glance. The jester is the wide- 
eyed, all-observing fellow. He is the many-sided, 
much-seeing man. The sense of humor is the true 
sense of proportion, and it has been rightly urged 
that only the humorists have perceived and painted 
life as it is. Only they have presented life in all its 
largeness. Of course, the humorists, who merely 
chose to jest and not write great tragedies, did not 
do such things, but they were ever great reformers. 
The man who laughs can be deeply religious with- 
out being a pietist: he can be deeply religious, yet 
behave decently; his existence is a sure cure for hy- 
steria. He infuses a little reason into things which 
prevents the sublime from becoming ridiculous. 
"A maggid, or preacher, once announced that he 
had written a new commentaryupon the' Hagadah.* 
'What!' everybody asked, 'are there not enough 
commentaries already in existence?' 'Yes,' said 

126 



A Jewish y ester 

Chabad, ' but he cannot make a living out of those/ 
At a wedding of the Jewish aristocracy of Wilna, 
where wealth was flaunted pompously, Motke was 
asked to say something funny. 'All the rich men of 
Wilna ought to be hanged/ he said. The wealthy 
guests were scandalized. 'Wherein is the joke?' 
they asked. 'It is no joke/ said Motke. 
"In the synagogue students of the Talmud were 
disputing a point concerning the use or rejed:ion of 
an egg 'with a blood-drop ' in it — a point to which 
so many pages of the holy books are devoted. 
'Why don't you throw the rotten egg out?' said 
Motke, who stood near. 'What's the use of wast- 
ing so much time?' 

"Once, it is told,when all his resources were at an end, 
Chabad went to the burial committee of the town, 
told the members that his wife had died and asked 
for the means of performing the last rites and cere- 
monies. He accordingly secured a few roubles, and 
when the committee-men and their officials came to 
take charge of the body, they found Motke, his wife 
and children, at their table enjoying a bountiful feast 
of roasted goose and things. 

"'Gentlemen,' exclaimed the master of the house- 
hold, ' you will have her ; I swear to you, you will have 
her. She is yours ; it is only a question of time.' 
" ' Fare thee well,' said Motke one day to a rich mer- 
chant. ' I am going away, and all I want of you is a 
few roubles for expenses.' His request was refused. 
*Then I am not going,' he announced, 'and you 

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Discourses of Keidansky 

need not farewell/ Chabad was also a match-maker, 
and his humor made him the best caricature of the 
institution. Thus once he came to a young man to 
speak of a match with a certain young woman. ' Oh, 
but she is lame,* protested the young man. 'Yes,' 
Chabad admitted, ' but that will keep her home, and 
prevent her from going out too much.' ' But she is 
blind,' the young man argued. ' So much the better,* 
said the shadchen; *she will not see you flirting with 
other women.' ' She is also deaf,' insisted the youth. 
'That is certainly fortunate,' was the reply; 'you 
will be able to say what you please in the house.* 
' But she is also dumb,' pleaded the vidlim.' ' Still 
better,' Motke assured him. 'There will always be 
quiet and peace in your home.' 'But she is also 
humpbacked!' the young man cried out in anger. 
'Well, well,' said Chabad, 'do you expedl her to be 
without a single fault ? ' Now I am almost ready for 
the maledictions," said Keidansky, as he was nearing 
the close of his argument, but I was suddenly called 
away. 



128 



XIV 

What Constitutes the yew? 

ONE day when I made a perilous ascent to 
Keidansky's garret, barely escaping harm 
through boxes and barrels and darkness and 
things in the way, I found him hard at work on an 
article — this time in the English language — on 
" What Constitutes the Jew ? '* A kind and inter- 
ested editor to whom I had the honor of introduc- 
ing him, asked my discovery to write on the subje6t, 
and pleased with the suggestion he took it up. He 
motioned to an up-turned coal scuttle for a seat as 
I entered, and bade me take a Jewish paper and be 
quiet. While I waited he finished his essay. "I 
have n't any time to talk to you," he said, looking 
disconsolate and running his long fingers through 
his curly black hair: "I want to read you this thing 
I Ve just scribbled. There he goes again — " he 
broke off in despair, as the old man in the next attic 
began to chant the Psalms. "But I shall read louder 
than he does," said Keidansky, " I pay rent here 
— sometimes — and King David, the fruit vendor, 
in there, sha'n't put me down." I listened, and he 
read as follows : 

" And after we have read about him in the comic 
weeklies, have seen him delineated in popular works 
of fidlion, have observed him caricatured in various 
publications, have beheld him portrayed on the 

129 



Discourses of Keidansky 

vaudeville stage and have heard from the slum stu- 
dent of the Ghetto ; after we have visited a few money 
lenders — on important business — have heard our 
minister talk patronizingly of him, telling pityingly 
of how he hath a great past and possessed more than 
a few commendable qualities, and of how he was, 
alas ! doomed to damnation because he would not 
accept the religion that he hath given to the world ; 
after we have bought clothing in one of his stores, 
taken a personal peep at the Ghetto, met a reformed 
rabbi, conversed with a distant descendant of his 
people, read the polite charges of his friend, the anti- 
Semite, and gone down and made beautiful speeches 
before him prior to the ele6lion ; I say even after we 
have done these things, or some of these things have 
happened to us, we must still ask the question : What 
constitutes the Jew ? 

" For, of a verity, he is so complex in his character, 
so heterogeneous in his general composition, so di- 
verse in his adivities, so many sided in his worldly 
and heavenly pursuits, so widely varying in his ap- 
pearance, so wonderfully ubiquitous, and withal such 
a living contradiction, that even after we have made 
the above painful efforts to understand him, we are 
still at a loss to know — what we know about him. 
" He represents one of the ancient races and yet is as 
up to date as any ; he reaches deepest into the past 
and looks furthest into the future ; he is the narrow- 
est conservative and the most advanced radical ; in 
religion he is the most dogmatic, sectarian, station- 

130 



IVhat Constitutes the yew P 

ary, orthodox, and also the most hberal and univer- 
sal reformer ; he is a member of the feeblest and 
strongest people on earth; he has no land of his own 
and he owns many lands ; his wealth is the talk and 
the envy of the world, and none is so poor as he ; his 
riches have ever been magnified and exaggerated, 
his dire poverty ever overlooked. 'As poor as a 
Jew* would be a truer simile than the one now in 
use. He is the infamous Shylock, the money-lender, 
yet he borrows as much and more money than he 
lends to others, only he pays his debts and so there 
is no talk about it ; Christians and others who bor- 
row from him go to court, denounce him, call him 
Shylock, and give him several pounds of 'tongue,* 
though he asks not for flesh, because it is not 'kosh- 
er,' and because whatever he is he is never cruel. 
Come to think of it, what a fine thing the Shylock 
story has ever been for those who did not want to 
pay their debts ! 

"He loans money to kings, and the kings oppress 
the Jews ; he is the great concentrator of wealth, and 
he is the Socialist and Anarchist working ardently 
for the abolition of the private ownership of wealth ; 
he is eminently pradlical, and is ever among the 
world-forgetting dreamers, 'the great host of im- 
pradicables ' ; he has no fine arts of his own, and he 
carries off the highest prizes for his glorious contribu- 
tion to the arts of the nations. Now he is exclusively 
confined to his own Hebrew, religious lore, believing 
that beyond it there are no heights to scale, no depths 

131 



Discourses of Keidansky 

to fathom, and then he becomes a Georg Brandes, a 
great interpreter of the literatures of the world ; his 
own literature is so Puritanical, so religious and 
chaste that there is hardly a single love song to be 
found therein, and then comes a Heinrich Heine. 
He is the slave of traditions and the first to break 
them ; persecute him and he will die for the religion 
of his fathers; give him freedom and he will pity 
them for their crude conceptions and applaud In- 
gersoll ; he is intensely religious and the rankest in- 
fidel; he condemns the theatre as being immoral, 
and he is the first to hail Ibsen and applaud him, 
even on the Yiddish stage; there is no one so clan- 
nish and so cosmopolitan as he is, and these contrasts 
can be multiplied to the abuse of time and space. 
"If, then, he is everything and to be found any- 
where, to be seen in all sorts of circumstances, in all 
walks of life and walking in so many diverse ways, 
making his way in such strongly contrasting condi- 
tions, how shall we know him? How shall we know 
what constitutes the Jew? He does not always abide 
in the Ghetto, and, things are coming to such a pass, 
that he rarely has the old Ghetto appearance. I sup- 
pose if our dear Mr. Zangwill had his own way he 
wouldfill the world with Ghettos. He couldusethem 
in his business. But perhaps the time is drawing nigh 
when we must have the books of Mr. Zangwill and 
other works of such excellence to preserve the most 
pid:uresque life of a unique people and save it from 
oblivion. The Ghetto walls are falling, falling. 

132 



What Constitutes the yew f 

"Old-fashioned folk, like other things, go out of 
fashion. The old-style long garb, the 'capota,' will 
take itself away after the toga, and such is the awful 
power of civilization that even the time-honored 
skull-caps of the men and the wigs of the women are 
vanishing before it. Time, with its scythe, cuts down 
even the curling sidelocks and the long beards dear 
to tradition. Up-to-date fashion is a democratic ty- 
rant, an expansionist invading and permeating all 
places and peoples. So we cannot count on these ex- 
ternals. Physiognomy is another thing by which to 
be misguided. Other outer details may help us as 
much as medicine can help the dead — or the living, 
for that matter. Then there are names. What's in a 
name? An opportunity for misunderstanding. One 
cannot even know himself by his name. All these 
artificial designations do not designate. 
" What, then, are the telling traits, the conspicuous 
charadteristics by which the typical, representative 
Jew may be known ? Now I am blissfully ignorant 
of anthropology, and could not analyze scientifi- 
cally, even at the risk of being destroyed critically. 
But through a certain accident — an accident of birth 
— I may be enabled to make a few suggestions, 
which I will offer with all due and undue apologies, 
of course. 

" First and foremost I should mention his wonder- 
ful versatility ; he is the most versatile ador in this 
play called life. He has acquired this versatility 
throughout his wanderings, sufferings, trials and 



Discourses of Keidanshy 

tribulations, and, together with his prodigious 
adaptability, it constitutes the secret of his sur- 
vival. Originally a being of the highest talent with 
the radiant glow of the Orient upon his brow, he 
had walked through the histories of many nations, 
and being persecuted by all peoples who recog- 
nized his talent, he received a most liberal educa- 
tion in the school of sorrow. Thus his abilities were 
cultivated and he learned to adapt himself easily to 
all circumstances and to create his own little world 
wherever he pitched his tent. 

" Mentally alert, keen of comprehension, quick to 
grasp any situation, almost too shrewd to be wise, 
practical to the detriment of his high ideals, calm, 
careful, cautious, calculating, hopeful in the face of 
despair, optimistic to a discouraging degree, often 
too regular and respe6table to become great; in- 
tensely individualistic, proud of his past, anxious 
about the future, ever devoted to his cause, self-ap- 
preciatory, at times too sure of his capabilities, con- 
fident in the ultimate decency of things, deeply in 
love with life — these are among the qualities that 
may be attributed to the Jew. 

"His isolated, peculiar and purely religious life, 
'the spiritual Palestine' which he has carried along 
with him in his wanderings through the darkness 
and cold of the Ghettos, has under all circumstances 
and in all hazards preserved those fine domestic and 
social qualities for which he is noted. What can now 
be said about his domesticity, his love of home and 

134 



What Constitutes the ^ew ? 






care of family ; his sobriety, thrift, peacefulness and 
good deportment, the readiness with which he 
cares for his poor, his pubHc spirit in the interests 
of his community — wherever that may be — his 
unequalled kindness; what can now be said about 
these things would be mere repetition; but these 
are nevertheless some of the undisputed qualities 
which constitute the Jew. Believing himself chosen 
of God, he has strong faith in the part he plays, 
the work he does, and the mission he is to per- 
form with his being. And like others who have 
much faith in themselves, he has abundance of con- 
ceit. But let us not call it that. ' Sublime egotism ' 
sounds so much better, and besides, the line of de- 
marcation between the two is so fine that it does not 
exist. The Jew is strongly individualistic in his so- 
cial tendencies, and for that reason often so progres- 
sive. He dares to deviate from the trodden path. He 
is not always in harmony with the rest of his commu- 
nity in which there is from time to time much dis- 
cord — discord that sometimes amounts to war.Thus 
the persecution of the Jews often begins at home. 
His receptive mental attitude often brings him into 
the ranks of the most radical, despite his traditions, 
which would hold him back. 

" He has talent to waste, and much of it is really 
wasted because he lacks opportunity for cultivation 
and frequently has not the required concentration 
and application. Perhaps it is better so ; for if all 
Jewish talent was brought out in the various forms 

135 



Discourses of Keidansky 

of greatness, what would — what would the anti- 
Semites not say? They would say that the Jews have 
stolen their talents. For anti-Semitism is the cry of 
despair of defeated mediocrity, or it is the plaint of 
the blinded Christian maddened byjealousy because 
he has been beaten by the wandering Jew in his own 
game of trade, commerce, politics, or art. But the 
Jew is kind, his kindness is unsurpassed, and the 
Hebrew line in which his people are called ' merci- 
ful sons of the merciful * is literally true. He pities 
the anti-Semite as he pities all who suffer and who 
are in want of the good things and the good quali- 
ties of life. 

" The Jew is a great possibility. Sensitive of and 
susceptible to all things, to the very color of the at- 
mosphere around him, with a soul sharpened by 
sorrow and a mindofkeenest understanding, he can 
become anything and everything, assimilate himself 
with any and all conditions, and illustrate life with a 
new meaning or adorn it with a worthy work. He is 
like unto an i^olian harp on which various breezes 
play various tunes. 

"His beautiful, consecrated, peaceful, religious, 
home life, the life wherein the home is a synagogue 
and the synagogue is a home, this on the one hand 
and the strange world with its hard realities, with its 
stumbling-blocks and stunning blockheads, on the 
other, have created in the Jew a striking two-sided- 
ness, a kind of duality and, if I may so call it, a sort 
of conciliation between the ideal and the real. This 

136 



What Constitutes the yew P 

forms another trait by which you may tell him. Thus 
he is very pradical, and still dreams, hopes for the 
restoration of Palestine, and loves his home and his 
country wherever he abides. He is an ardent Zionist 
and a good citizen at the same time. 
" Murder, or any other kind of talent, will out. Say 
rather that talent will out even if it must come in the 
shape of murder, so to speak. People capable of the 
highest good and noblest greatness are often cast 
down into the abyss of degradation by their loving 
neighbors, or other circumstances. People must 
live, you know, and therefore they often live a living 
death. Not permitted to live rightly and happily, they 
still must live somehow. The instindl of self-preser- 
vation preserves much evil, but life is life. Those 
who have talent and are not permitted to use it for 
the good of all, use it for their own temporal good, 
regardless of the consequences. The thought that I 
wish to leave here as we part with the Jew is : That 
they who walk in darkness find the ways that are 
dark. Over-praise is damning, and I want to be care- 
ful. The Jew has on the whole been far, far better 
than he has been permitted to be — and this, too, is 
one of the charges against him. He is a graduate of 
the school of sorrow, with the highest honors. 
" What is that story about the man who in his long 
quest after the ideal, at last found her in the woman 
who has suffered? 
Well, here is the Jew, a being who has suffered." 



137 



(( 



s 



XV 

The Tragedy of Humor 

OMETIMES," said Keidansky, "it is 
grossly immoral to live up to your highest 
principle.'* And in reply to my half-uttered 
protest, he quickly continued: " No, no; I am not 
jesting. It 's a sad business, this jesting about the hu- 
man tragedy. For what is it but mocking each other's 
wounds, laughing at one another's infirmities in this 
great lazaretto,where we are all pitiful patients P What 
is it but scoffing at our sores, grinning at our gashes, 
deriding our diseases, laughing at our own weak- 
nesses? No, I am not jesting," and the speaker eyed 
me strangely as he looked up from his manuscript 
on the little table in Machtell's cafe. 
" Beneath the levity is lead," he said slowly. " Be- 
hind all the fun is crushing failure. Behind all the 
satire is sorrowful shortcoming. Behind the smile is 
a searing smart. Grief lurks in the grin. Through all 
the drollery despair peers forth, and there is noth- 
ing more lugubrious than laughter. Comedy is made 
up of error, failure, confusion, misunderstanding, 
misfortune, misdired:ed effiarts and wasted energy. 
Whenever error ends fatally it is called tragic, but 
that is not the worst. The real tragedy is not the play 
that ends with the death of the leading characters, 
but the one in which they are condemned to struggle 
and live on and laugh and be laughed at. Each one 



Discourses of Keidansky 

of us is his own caricature. There is so little to do, 
yet we all overdo it. We all reduce our lives to ab- 
surdities. Our efforts exaggerate their importance 
and betray our barbarities. 

" We overdraw our characters and all our lifetime 
suffer in our own estimation. The more serious we 
are the more extravagant is the farce. As we creep 
along the roads, the shadows we cast mock and men- 
ace us. 

" We are poor debtors, all. With infinite intentions 
in a world of infinitesimal possibilities, our efforts 
constantly caricature and cartoon our aims. All our 
works are filled with comic illustrations galore. We 
make them ourselves, and they overshadow our 
works. Did you ever see any one fall on the street 
and a lot of lookers-on laugh? Well, that is in a 
measure the history and interpretation of humor. 
" We seek and do not find ; we fight and do not con- 
quer; we play and do not win; we attempt, but do 
not achieve; we aspire and do not attain; we desire 
and are not gratified; we long for light yet grope on 
in darkness; we struggle and are defeated; we strive 
for salvation and discover it to be a mere sham ; our 
labor is lost, our love is not returned, our devotion 
is not understood, our wings are broken at the point 
of flying, all our yearnings are in vain ; and then, the 
newspaper humorist writes half a column of pointed 
jottings out of these things ; or else the literary come- 
dian will prepare a series of funny papers. Do you 
understand now what an appalling, grim and grue- 

140 



'The Tragedy of Humor 

some spedacle there is behind all these little jests ? 
And how tragic it is for the humorist who sees it all ? 
They say that a Scotchman laughs on the third day 
after he hears a joke. It does not take so long to find 
that there is nothing to laugh at. It is all so sad. 
Think what a tremendous tragedy the funny para- 
grapher sums up in a few lines and sells to ' Puck ' 
for J2.98. Come, take up a column of comicalities 
in any publication and see what is at the bottom of 
every jest. What is it about. f* Is it about a man and 
a woman linked together by law, with a Chinese wall 
of misunderstanding between them, ' so strangely 
unlike and so strongly attached to each other ' that 
it is hell for both of them ? Or, is it about a woman 
who wears her life away in the farce of 'Vanitas Vani- 
tatum?' Is it about the greedy mercenary who loses 
his soul to gain the world? Or is it about one who 
gives up the world to gain nothing P 
" Is it about an enthusiastic youth who, to escape the 
materialism of his surroundings, jumps from the fry- 
ing-pan into Bohemia; or is it about a philosopher 
who, gazing at the stars, falls into a mud puddle.^ Is 
it about the poet starving in a garret, or is it about 
the artist lost in the quest of the unattainable ? Is it 
about the moral principle trampled under foot be- 
cause of the material advantage, or is it about the 
low life of him who longs for the highest ? What is 
it about? Is it about a man who bleeds and a woman 
who laughs, or is it about beings who sell themselves 
for life with promises to love, honor, cherish and 

141 



Discourses of Keidansky 

proted ? Is it about some one groping in darkness, 
grappling with the impossible, or is it about a great 
republic gone mad over the visit of an effete repre- 
sentative of monarchy? Perhaps it is about a bright 
American girl in quest of a titled idiot, or else about 
a being so degraded that he is in mortal fear of work 
and has a horror for soap ! It may be about medi- 
ocrity dreaming of talent, of failures chasing the 
phantoms of success, of fading beauty, waning love, 
of the stumbling of the blind, or of any and all the 
confusions of error and the thousands of misunder- 
standings of the home and of people who are near 
and fail to be dear to each other. The list is too long. 
It can never be exhausted. But at the bottom of any 
one of the jests, old or new, you will find an excru- 
ciating little tragedy. It is all so sad, sorrowful and 
depressing. The humor of the situation ? Say rather 
the tragedy of the case. 

" And to look behind, to peer through the pano- 
rama, to see all this, to have a sense of humor and 
to have it bad, is not such a cheerful thing as it is 
thought to be, for it is also a sense of our hopeless- 
ness. It is a sad business, this jesting about the hu- 
man tragedy — or the human farce. In other words, 
it is to see the futility of all our efforts, the failure of 
all our fighting, the uselessness of our aspirations, 
the emptiness of our aims, the vanity of our striv- 
ings, the nothingness of it all. Life, with all its faults 
and foibles and failures, with all its incongruities, 
irreconcilables, clashes and unfitnesses, stretches out 

142 



The Tragedy of Humor 

before you as just so much material for sardonic sat- 
ire. Scrambling, squabbling, scurrying, seething, 
squally squads and crowds of humanity, how grue- 
somely grotesque it all is and how ludicrous ! With 
all its heroics, brave deeds and still greater brava- 
does, with all its gloried wonders and wonderful 
achievements, with all its glorious boasts, lofty hopes 
and superb masteries, with all our arts and philoso- 
phies, humanity and the whole world seems to me 
like a swarmingmole-hill,and at times moves me to 
nothing but to laughter. It is so ridiculous, all the 
mimicry of the whole microcosm. Tell me, have you 
ever been seized by a sense of the utter absurdity of 
it all, so that you laughed and laughed until there 
were tears of blood, almost, in your eyes? 
" I wonder if you know what it is to have a mocking 
demon within you to laugh and leer at everything 
you do, at every step you take, at your best deeds, 
finest words, greatest strides, noblest endeavors. 
Imagine a voice that at every turn of the road — es- 
pecially when you ad: your grandest, talk your loud- 
est, achieve your highest — that at every turn of the 
road exclaims: 'How absurd, how silly of you!' 
Imagine a state of mind when all is farce around you 
and your own caricature is your constant companion. 
Such things happen to some people, and to them 
everything is so unreal, so absurd, so stupid; the 
greatest events, the sublimest utterances, are ever so 
laughable. The more seriously the people play their 
parts the more ridiculous the performance seems. 

143 



Discourses of Keidansky 

The greater the tragedy the more laughter. What is 
so funny as Hamlet's soliloquy? What are so laugh- 
able as the ravings of Job P And so it sometimes feels 
with the other sublimely sad things that have been 
written. The moving finger writes, and the mocking 
voice within laughs — laughs at everything and you 
can take nothing seriously. You take up the best, 
the most pathetic things you have written yourself, 
and even these make you smile. Such things have 
been said before and they were absurd and out of 
place — in the first place. Whatever you do you hear 
the mocking voice from within say : ' Silly creature, 
those things have been done before, and they have 
only led fools to their dusty death.' You whisper the 
sweetest things, prompted by love to your lady fair, 
and the voice from within : ' Silly fool, these things 
have been said before and the course of true love 
never did run long.' You have a feeling that it is all 
histrionic, all a(5i:ing, all farce, and that we are all 
overdoing our parts tremendously. Strutting, swag- 
gering, blustering, bombastic swashbucklers all. It 
is not life. It is an historical novel. It will sink into 
nothingness. ' O, 'Tbor,du Thor ^duprahlender 'Thor! ' 
Do you remember Bret Harte's parody on Hugo's 
'Les Miserables'? So easily is the sublime tipped 
over and made ridiculous. 'T is but a slight step from 
pathos to bathos. But wait until I address this letter 
to the New York 'Abend Blatt.' Abe Cahan came 
over here and spoke for the Socialists this afternoon, 
so I wrote the thing up. H e is in the other room with 

144 



The Tragedy of Humor 

that blatant crowd of Jewish adtors. They are taking 
him to task for one of his reviews in the ' Arbeiter 
Zeitung' of a recent performance of theirs. They 
never know exactly what a critic means except when 
he does not criticise. They are to give here Gordin's 
'Jewish King Lear' to-morrow night. You don't 
know Cahan? He is one of the brightest, biggest 
men in our movement. I come in here," Keidansky 
explained, " because these a6tors are so ignorant of 
the conventions, simple and natural, and I like them 
for it. 

"There is a story by J. L. Peretz," Keidansky con- 
tinued, after he had folded up and addressed his 
communication, " that I want to tell you apropos of 
what I have been saying. Peretz is one of the literary 
masters of to-day, but he writes in Yiddish, so the 
world misses his greatness. The story is about a re- 
former, a revolutionary, an idealist. He addresses a 
meeting in behalf of his cause, speaks fervently, pas- 
sionately, ' spits fire,' waves a sharp sword at his au- 
dience and makes a ringing appeal for the truth. In 
the room where he speaks there is a mirror. Acci- 
dentally he looks into it. He sees himself His enthu- 
siasm leaves him at once, his fervor vanishes, he loses 
his power of speech, becomes calm, indifferent, and 
finishes his oration in disgust. He no longer feels 
the saint and hero he felt. While speaking so ex- 
citedly he looked like a murderer in the mirror. 
After this he has an unearthly dream about the 
part of hell that is allotted to reformers. When he 

145 



Discourses of Keidansky 

wakes up he receives a postal card asking him to 
come to another meeting of the revolutionists. He 
immediately burns the card. This is giving but the 
faintest outlines of the story, but you see Peretz, 
like Heine, also has the sense of humor developed 
to a tragic extent — to the extent of seeing the absur- 
dity, futility and irony of it all — even our grandest 
efforts. 

" Yes, so it seems to some eyes, and so it is at least to 
those who see it so. After all, what is it? A cry and a 
struggle and a sigh, a flash of light and a streak of 
dawn and darkness, and then we stand by the grave 
and weep for the dead that the living may see our 
tears. Ah, the helplessness and hopelessness of it all; 
the desolation and despondency, the thoughts that 
paralyze the mind and stifle the soul; all things out 
of joint, out of proportion, and Fate cries out to you 
in the slang phrase 'you don't fit!' Ah, the humor 
of the entire procession and the deep tragic back- 
ground behind it. Seek and you will find, and when 
you find you shall not want it. Wealth makes us 
weary of it. Fame brings her wreath and finds her 
poet dead. Faith consoles, but we have the con- 
sciousness all along that we are sick and are taking 
medicine. ' Love grows hate for love's sake and life 
takes death for guide.' Love? Have ever two souls 
come near each other? Those whom we love most 
understand us least. Happiness? The art of finding 
happiness is one of the lost arts. No one is ever con- 
sciously happy. Knowledge is almost positive proof 

146 



"The Tragedy of Humor 

that we cannot know. With it we are more puzzled 
than we were without it. The last word of science is 
'wait.* What do we know? Moses wentup to heaven, 
but God refused to be interviewed. The people, like 
the modern editor, insisted upon a story and so we 
have the Bible. But science and the higher criticism 
has interrupted our reading and spoiled the pleasure 
of it. What do we know? Even Professor Daniel De 
Leon does not know everything. Man asks ques- 
tions, investigates, ^und ein Narr wartet aut Ant- 
wort.^ Life contains more emptiness than anything 
else. Life is a long wait for that which does not come. 
Is life worth living? *Tis not worthwhile asking the 
question. '* 

" If that is so, or seems so," I hazarded the question, 
"then why be here?" 

"Why, to see it all, to enjoy the tragedy," Kei- 
dansky answered with swift enthusiasm. " I would 
not advise my best friend to commit suicide. Such 
an exciting farce. What would life be, what would 
art be without the tragic elements in it? It's great! 
But I began to tell you why it is sometimes grossly 
immoral to live up to your highest principles, when 
my train of thought was wrecked. Some other time. 
Come, let's go into the other room and I '11 intro- 
duce you to the players and to Comrade Cahan — if 
he is still alive." 



H7 



Y 



XVI 

'The Immorality of Principles 

ES, I have promised to tell you why it is 
sometimes grossly immoral to live up to 
your highestprinciples. It was a rash prom- 
ise, yet I shall try to make it good. And though it 
was several weeks ago, I am more than ever in- 
clined to think the same way.'* 
Thus spake Keidansky when I reproachfully re- 
minded him of a former utterance. 
" There are the missionaries," he said, " who go forth 
among peaceful, law-avoiding savages to force upon 
them a religion that has outlived its usefulness, a re- 
ligion that has not prevented them from doing such 
an immoral, impolite thing.They go forth to promul- 
gate the truth of which they are not sure. They in- 
vidiously invade the premises of goodly primitive 
people, and ruthlessly trample upon their traditions, 
beliefs, superstitions and feelings. We shut people 
out of our country, and we send missionaries to offer 
them free admission or standing-room in our heaven. 
Heedless that their bodies are starving, we come and 
ask to let us save their souls. We forget that they 
have a right to their religion, to their way of non- 
thinking, to take the medicine they like ; that their 
method of salvation is best for them, 

'That human hopes and human creeds 
Have their roots in human needs.' 
149 



Discourses of Keidansky 

We forget that they have just as much a right to 
wear their mental corsets as we have to wear ours, 
or, if you wish, that their behefs are as true to 
them as ours are to us. We forget that they speak 
to God in their own language. We go forth among 
them and mock at all that is holy and dear to their 
hearts. 

"Of course, missionaries, like all agitators, are de- 
voted people, living up to their very highest prin- 
ciples, and we all mean well ; but this sort of business, 
this invasion and utter disregard for others, is to me 
grossly immoral. And to court and minister to the 
needs of cannibals and brigands is too much altru- 
ism on our part, and that excessive phase of it is 
wicked and hurtful.*' 

" But," I protested, "is not the legitimate advocacy 
of ideas justifiable?" 

"Yes," said Keidansky, "the legitimate advocacy of 
ideas. There are those who on one day of the week 
would turn our cities into cemeteries, who would 
stifle our spirits and starve our souls, who on that 
day deny us music and mirth and song — think it 
a sin to smile, wicked to be happy, and a crime to 
make merry. If they could reach the sun, they 
would stop it from working overtime and shining 
on the Lord's day; yet if the sun should ever reach 
them, their piety would not cast such a pall over 
the community. Yes, I know; but listen. Have pa- 
tience. Patience is a Christian virtue, which Chris- 
tians have forced upon Jewish money-lenders. I 

150 



The Immorality of Principles 

know that there are many people to-day who have 
quite a high opinion of the Almighty, beheving that 
He loves light and sunshine, laughter and joy, and 
glories in the happiness of every living thing, 
down to the humblest worm. But I am speaking of 
the others — those who deny the pleasure of every- 
thing except self-denial ; for whom the only laws of 
life are the blue laws. 

"Just now our city is being held up by the poHce, 
and at the point of a club told to be good and 
pious and religious. We are told not to breathe, or 
sigh, or sneeze, or smile, or show any signs of life 
on Sunday. Orders to stop the circulation of our 
blood on that day have not yet been issued, but 
everything comes to those who wait — every evil 
comes to those who have over-zealous pietists among 
them. To heaven, or be damned. It is a case of 
your adherence, or your life. You must be killed, 
or cured. Now in this disregard of disbelievers, the 
narrowness of vision and hurtful overzeal, I dis- 
cern something immoral. 

"Yet it is a matter of principle to spread whatever 
gospel one has been captured by. Personally, I have 
never been so tortured by any as by those people 
who wished to save me, and out of justice to them, 
I must say that they tortured me according to their 
highest principles. It must be admitted that there is 
an amount of good and pleasure for the agitator, in- 
volved in agitation, yet his work cannot, generally, 
be called moral on the ground that it conduces to 

151 



Discourses of Keidansky 

happiness, because he is only one, and those whom 
he is molesting to save are many. 
"And so many of those who sacrifice and abnegate 
and deny themselves, who negled: nature, ignore 
the laws of their being, emaciate their bodies and 
starve their souls, is it not immoral of them to weak- 
en their constitutions, minds and spirits, and dimin- 
ish their power for positive good in the world? In 
the end, are not many of them miserably misled by 
their highest principles? 

"If he loseth the world, what shall it profit a man 
that he gaineth his soul? Of what earthly use is a 
soul, without a wicked world to use it in? To what 
good is a soul without all the opportunities of los- 
ing it? 

"Alone in the mountains, far from the madding 
crowd, it is easy to be sane and soulful and saintly ; 
but to me, every effort to separate the soul from the 
world is immoral, though it is in accord with some 
lofty principles. The soul outside of the world is a 
tramp who shirks work. To remain in the world, to 
do, to work, to wage war against weakness, to live 
strongly and have no fear — that is the soul doing 
its duty, and sowing happiness for all. 
"And speaking of happiness for others, in the first 
place, it is not right to force it upon others against 
their consent, and in the second place, it is wrong 
to do it at the expense of your own welfare. Do all 
that you can for yourself first, or you are not justi- 
fied in trying to manage other lives on a better 

152 



T'he Immorality of Principles 

basis. I believe in perfedion, but I believe that as 
much of it as is possible should begin with the per- 
fedionists. I believe that nothing is worth doing, 
unless there is a sound reason for it. I believe in 
egoism. Altruism may have done much good, but 
I pity the Altruists, who have enervated, weakened 
and impoverished themselves by their mostly futile 
attempts to help others. 

" Largely, altruism is an attempt to do for others 
what you cannot do for yourself. 
" There are principles which have led people to lose 
all that was good in them. The roads to unattain- 
able ideals and impossible perfections are strewn 
with countless corpses of lost victims. People lose 
their health, peace, welfare and all, trying to do for 
others what, in so many cases, cannot be done at 
all. All this is wrong. It is wrong to add to the store 
of the world's misery, though you are attempting 
to alleviate it. No, no one should work for philan- 
thropy unless he gets a good salary for it. As to 
asceticism, it has never been a profitable business. 
Contrary to other religions, Judaism rather stood 
for the joy of life than the arrest of it. 
" I have seen much of the problem of immoral prin- 
ciples among our radicals of the Ghetto, many of 
whom have ruined and wrecked their lives because 
of the ideas they advocated. If the dream of social 
justice would be realized to-morrow, many of them 
would not have the strength to enjoy it. Others are 
so weak that they would not be able to stand the 



Discourses of Keidansky 

shock. There were those who had others dependent 
upon them, and who negledled everything and 
everybody, particularly themselves, for the sake of 
'the cause,' and who finally became utterly useless. 
They added to the poverty of the East Side in their 
efforts to abolish it, while if they had taken good 
care of themselves they would, in the long run, 
have done vastly more for their ideals. Among my 
plots for stories that I have never written, is the 
case of a man who became a tramp, because he was 
too anxious to abolish the system that produces 
tramps. One of the finest poets of the East Side is 
now a mental and physical wreck, because he lived 
up to his highest principles — and negledled him- 
self. 

"Enthusiasts very often lose the sense of justice, 
become oblivious to everything — except the in- 
visible. I know too well the nobility of the motives; 
I know that there are more of them on the East 
Side than any other place in America ; I know, also, 
that a cause requires such sacrifices, yet, what are 
the results? Very often, failure. It has been observed 
that a man, who in the midst of a savage or barba- 
rous community, in defiance of current social or re- 
ligious customs, should attempt to live the ideal life 
of a perfed: civilization, would doubtless be quickly 
eliminated from such a society by violent and tragi- 
cal means, and thus effedively be stopped from in- 
fluencing those around him to better ways of living. 
A great deal of our enforced civilization of savage 

154 



The Immorality of Principles 

races has been fatal in its effedls upon the health 
and happiness of the vast majority, while it has 
failed to elevate the average morals of the survi- 
vors. Authorities say that this is likely to be the 
result, whenever conventional education is forced 
upon a people in advance of their functional de- 
velopment.The Hawaiian Islanders are pointed out 
as an impressive example, and the missionaries, as 
well as the radicals of the Ghetto, trying to convert 
their orthodox brethren, ought to remember these 
things. 

"The way out of it? Some one says: 'That course 
of condud: must be adopted which will promote the 
greatest possible development of life-giving ener- 
gies, both in the individuals immediately affected, 
and in society at large, including the life of poster- 
ity.' That's science, if I have the quotation right. 
Principles should be founded on fad:, and be con- 
ducive to the largest happiness, including even the 
happiness of the one who holds the principles. In 
size, they should be more than 8 by 12 inches. They 
should be a yard wide — wide enough and true 
enough for all. Yet they should be such principles 
as to allow others to hold other principles. The right 
principles, in accord with the best laws of life, and 
not theology, will come up to all requirements, and 
they will be moral. 

"Yes, individualism by all means,*' he added; "be 
yourself, but don't be a savage." 



"^SS 



XVII 

7 he Exile of the Earnest 

I MET Keidansky at the performance of a Yid- 
dish play, and our talk turned to matters dra- 
matic. 
" I notice by the papers," I remarked, " that Sarah 
Bernhardt has just produced a play written for her 
by F. Marion Crawford, the American novelist. So 
we are going to supply the theatres of other coun- 
tries with plays. Are you interested?*' 
" Very much," said Keidansky ; " this is not the only 
case of an American writing for the foreign stage, 
and it suggests to me a fine possibility. About Craw- 
ford I know but little; but he is one of our popular 
men. He has, according to his own confession, writ- 
ten to please; he has never offended any living 
beings by putting them into his works ; he has never 
attempted to pi6lure life, uninteresting as it is, and 
he is, on the whole, not one of those that we should 
want to send away to write plays for the people of 
other lands. And I am rather glad his ' Francesca da 
Rimini' has failed in London. 
" But if there are any among us who are terribly in 
earnest, with tremendous intentions to elevate the 
stage, to write plays that will instrudl, stimulate, up- 
lift, to take all the struggles of humanity and put 
them into dramas — why let them learn some one of 
the foreign languages and go abroad and write plays 

157 



Discourses of Keidansky 

for the serious people of Europe. Yes, if they persist 
in these things, and want to make us think, and all 
that sort of thing, which is short of pleasure, if they 
cannot amuse us with something funny or entertain 
us with something nice and romantic, why let them 
go abroad. It's the only way we can get rid of them, 
and we shall not mourn the loss of those who would 
have us do nothing else but mourn. 
"We Americans do not want any plays that require 
intelled:,for we need all that we have in our business 
enterprises ; we do not want to think in the theatre, 
because it takes all our thoughts to advertise and sell 
our goods, nor do we want our emotions stirred, for 
that is a nervous strain, clouds the mind, and makes 
people unfit for speculation, scheming or anything 
on the next day. Then, these plays that arrest the 
brain and touch our very soul, they make us senti- 
mental, soft-hearted, kind-natured, and draw us out 
on long conversations with our wives, children and 
friends. Meanwhile the wheels of trade are turning, 
and in the race for success we are left behind. 
"We are a healthy people, and we don't want any 
morbid, lurid, ghastly produdlions over here, and in 
a large sense all very serious works are morbid, lu- 
gubrious and gloomy. At bottom of them there is 
always a problem, an evil, a crying wrong, a morbid 
state of something. A happy home is not dramatic; 
people at peace with themselves and the world are 
not good subjed:s for tragedy. According to the 
conception of these earnest writers there is no plot 

158 



"The Exile of the Earnest 

for a play without a peck of trouble. We don't want 
any such dramatic dishes served. We don't want 
people to play upon our feelings, and yet pay them 
for it. Occasionally, we are willing to have something 
a little bit sad, but we want it to end happily. But 
the earnest ones tell us that in real life few sad stories 
end happily, that their pidures are true to life. Hang 
it, we ourselves know they are true to life. There 's 
plenty of trouble at home, — that 's why we go to the 
theatre — to forget it. Gorky pid:ures a man — fat 
and forty, successful and comfortable as a govern- 
ment official — a man, who after reading ' a book of 
one of these modern much-praised writers,' comes 
to the conclusion that he is 'an insignificant nonen- 
tity, a superfluous being, of no use to any one.' 
"This is just what one of the modern plays does for 
you. See, it seems to say, see, you crown of creation, 
what a crawling creature you are. Your past is what 
it ought not to have been. Your present is what it 
ought not to be. 'The future is but the past again, 
entered through another gate.' Yesterday you were 
a fool — to-morrow you will be a still greater one. 
Your best resolutions shall become bitter regrets. 
You are weak, and you make laws and build gov- 
ernments and create creeds, and they make you 
weaker yet. All the adornments of your civilization 
are relics of barbarism. Evolution is too slow for 
anything, and you cannot get ahead of yourself. You 
have talked all your life and not uttered an original 
thought. There have been a few original beings, but 

^S9 



Discourses of Keidansky 

most of you are poor imitations — you must follow 
others. You must have a master, either in heaven, or 
on earth ; you are a slave of society. You strike for 
freedom and anti-conventionality only when it be- 
comes a fad. You don't understand. Your children 
cannot teach you anything. You are too old to learn. 
When you were young you had only your parents 
to instruct you. Your home rests upon false assump- 
tions. It is a field of battle — or there are no strong 
individuals in it and all is peace. The theory of he- 
redity is not true — your children are stupid; your 
wife is a doll, which you have chosen for her pretty 
cheeks, and, though she is fading, claims the rights 
of a free-born human being, and does not under- 
stand — but what's the use? Of what earthly good 
can such plays be.? Why should we in this free, in- 
dependent and prosperous country listen to such 
things ? Besides, family quarrels, filial relations, dis- 
agreements between relatives are not fit materials 
for the dramatist. It is none of his business to med- 
dle in such private matters. If there is trouble in the 
home, if a man and a woman find that one and one is 
two, if the interests of certain persons, or classes, are 
against those of others, if people find their religion 
too small for them and their laws not big enough, 
why there are courts that they can go to, and legis- 
latures and clergymen and lawyers and Christian 
Scientists and so many other sources of help and 
salvation. For a writer it is extremely bad taste to 
deal with such matters. His mission is to amuse us, 

1 60 



The Exile of the Earnest 

and he has no right to abdicate the sovereignty of 
his exalted office. 

"At least that is what we Americans — the majority 
of our people — think, and if there are writers among 
us so abnormally serious as to see things otherwise, 
there is but one thing to do with them — we should 
send them away to other countries where people 
like that kind of dreary drama. 
" Let them, like Marion Crawford, write for the 
French stage. The French are not even shocked 
when they see a real resemblance between life and 
the drama. In fad: they put everything into their 
plays, all their faults, and I wonder how they can 
look at these plays. So many things happen in 
France, and it is all in their books and plays, besides 
a lot of things that never happen. You cannot in 
their country escape life and all its troubles by going 
to the theatre or reading one of their novels. All 
life's tribulations, turmoil and travail are in them. 
Not that the people are over-earnest, but that they 
like something strong, love to be stirred and moved, 
and are recklessly unafraid of the vertigoes of 
thought. They have great artists and wonderfully 
fine writers, but their dramatic works are terribly 
upsetting. A good performance of 'Camille ' breaks 
a person up for several days. They are a dangerous 
lot, all the French writers. 

" No, we over here do not want such produdlions. 
There are plenty of pretty incidents and fables out 
of our romantic history that we can use on our stage. 

i6i 



Discourses of Keidansky 

Every veteran of our wars tells enough of his own 
heroic deeds to make a dozen of plays. Then there 
are so many historical novels, guaranteed to have 
nothing to do with life, that have not as yet been 
dramatized. Such plays would help us to understand 
our grand history. 

" But there is lots of room in Europe for our would- 
be realists, and our government would do well by 
making an appropriation for their instrudlion in 
foreign languages and their deportation to the lands 
of burdensome intentions, revolutionary move- 
ments and problem plays. This would mean peace 
in our own country. 

"There are the Germans, who love Schopenhauer 
and beer and usually drink the two together. They 
feel intensely, revel in realism and have the keenest 
enjoyment of tragedy. Nothing is too sad, sombre, 
or too stirring for their stage. All the unanswered 
questions that have vainly troubled the ages are 
raised in their dramatic and literary works. What an 
uncomfortable prospedt that is ! They always have 
men who writes plays that will never die. They have 
no shame, these Germans. They feel strongly and 
openly show it. Altogether they have a passion for 
the thoughtful, and give the modern playwright 
with tendencies a splendid opportunity. But what is 
to be said of a country that can produce such play 
as Hauptmann*s ' Die Weber' — a country that can 
send fifty Socialist members to the Reichstag? Yes, 
we can safely send them to Germany, or else to 

162 



T'he Exile of the Earnest 

Russia. It would be hard for an American to learn 
that language, but Russia is the land where they say 
the most daring, the boldest things in the most can- 
did manner, or without any manner at all. I don't 
know why it is unless it is because free speech is for- 
bidden in that country. There the play, or the novel, 
palpitates with life and vibrates with heart-throbs. 
All the evil and oppression and ruin of the country 
cries out through its literature and drama, and the 
people worship such art. Life itself is seen on the 
Russian stage. This is where we should send our 
earnestwriters. True, there is a censorship in Russia, 
but the radical utterances of an American author will 
easily pass the Russian censor. 
" There is Norway, where a man like Ibsen, who 
has made that country the scene of ad:ion of all the 
tragedies of the world, is allowed at large after an 
exile of many years. Ibsen has held up the Land of 
the Midnight Sun as a dominion of darkness, yet 
they like him and are also proud of him in his coun- 
try. Belgium is another good market for the serious 
and revolutionary drama. In Spain, Echegarayis do- 
ing nearly what Ibsen is doing in Norway, and he 
has a number of literary companions with similar 
sombre intentions. Even in England they are be- 
ginning to write such plays, and an American can 
easily learn the English language. It 's a good 
thing that Henry James prefers to live in England, 
only we ought to put a tariff on his psychological 
stories. We need not fear. Any and all these coun- 

163 



Discourses of Keidansky 

tries will serve us as places of exile for our earnest 
authors. 

" But hold on, I Ve nearly forgotten. Perhaps the 
expenses of sending these people to Europe can be 
saved. Let them learn to write in Yiddish, for in the 
Jewish theatres of the New York Ghetto all sorts 
of serious, sombre, life-like, problematic and power- 
ful plays are produced." 



164 



XVIII 

Why Social Reformers Should Be Abolished 

" np T 'S quite a problem/' said Keidansky, sudden- 
I ly, after a pensive pause, as he watched the 
A glimmering lights of the Cambridge bridge 
across the gloomy Charles. 
"What is?" I asked. 

"How to abolish the social reformers/' he answered 
in a tone of determination. 

It was nearly two o'clock in the morningwhen we left 
the little cafe where we spent part of the evening, and 
he said it was too early to go home, which in any case 
was the last resort. 1 1 was so roasting hot up in his at- 
tic, that no matter what time he climbed up there, he 
would be "well done" by the time he rose in the 
morning. But the place he told me of had this advan- 
tage : it was delightfully cool in the winter. Keidansky 
was physically exhausted and mentally lazy, and 
would say but little at first. He had spent the day in 
preparing an article for one of the Jewish papers, and 
during the evening gave two lessons in English, visit- 
ing his pupils at their homes ; for it was thus, he once 
informed me, that he learned what English he knew 
— by teaching it to others. Incidentally these lessons 
he gave and his journalistic efforts helped to pay for 
the necessities of life, such as rent, laundry, lunches, 
symphony concerts ("on the rush"), admissions to 
pidure exhibitions, books, gallery tickets to the best 

165 



Discourses of Keidansky 

plays that came to town, etc. He had worked very 
hard that day, he said, which was a dired: violation 
of his principle. He did what he could to keep his 
ideas out of his article, and he hoped it would be pub- 
lished. He felt tired, did not want to go home, and 
proposed that we walk over to the Charlesbank Park 
where, on a night like this, we could at least in im- 
agination conjure up a breeze. 
"Your whim is law," I said, and we set off for the 
park. I had been speaking of a Yiddish melodrama 
which had been produced in Boston a few days be- 
fore. Keidansky had not seen the play, but he intend- 
ed to write a review of it for one of the New York 
papers. He knew all about it and the species to which 
it belonged. When capital punishment was abol- 
ished, sitting through one of these plays would bean 
all-sufficient penalty for murder, he said. Then this 
subjed: gave out and there was a pause, after which 
Keidansky made the startling remark concerning 
social reformers. 

"Abolish them? Do you really mean it?" I asked. 
"Yes, though I do say it," he replied. 
" What for ?" I, being puzzled, queried again, and he 
answered : 

" For the welfare of society, and perhaps also the sure 
approach of the millennium." He continued : "The 
social reformers, as a rule, are a most unsocial job lot 
of people. As I have known them, their business has 
been to frighten, to scowl, to scare, and to make a 
mountain of evil out of a mole-hill that did not exist. 

i66 



Social Reformers Should be Abolished 

They are often the most blinded zealots, the nar- 
rowest-minded, one-sided partisans, with tremen- 
dous, almost Dante-like propensities to conjure up 
hair-raising horribles, but with the genius and the 
poetry of a Dante left out. Their method is to cut 
lifeup piecemeal, pepper itgood and heavy, and send 
you to bed with a few bitter morsels. After a night of 
the most excruciating nightmares, you wake up with 
a nauseous taste in your mouth, and a pronounced 
case of reformania. It is not so much what they say, 
as how they emphasize it; the very dictionary groans 
beneath the weight of their abuse of adjectives, and 
after a time they convince you that you don't know 
your own address, that you have not, as you imag- 
ined, been living on the planet earth, but in the most 
devilish, hellish purgatory. 

"In order to convert this earth into a heaven, they 
must needs make it appear to be the blackest hell. In 
order to abolish evil, they must prove that nothing 
else exists. To convince you of the infinite possibili- 
ties in the development of men, they must prove to 
you that they have ever been divided between par- 
asitic capitalists and starving slaves. Evolution, as 
they concod; it for you, has been a process of going 
from bad to worse, from a mild form of slavery to a 
more abjed: one. 

"You see, they are in for effect, and with the aid of 
the most bombastic language and turgid phraseol- 
ogy they are bound to make it, no matter how many 
people they dishearten, discourage and dismay. To 

167 



Discourses of Keidansky 

damn humanity, they think, is but a trifle when their 
supreme end is to save the world. Hope is not in 
heaven, earth sees no gentler star; earth is hell and 
hell bows down before the social reformer. The re- 
former that I mean is a man ever wandering about 
with a pail of black paint in one hand, a brush in the 
other, and with an expression of heartrending sorrow 
in his face because he cannot find a ladder high 
enough to enable him to put a few coats of his paint 
on the skies. The world must be saved at any cost, 
say these reformers, and if the world is the cost, why it 
is dead cheap at that, when they can become saviors 
of society and possibly sainted martyrs. And so they 
proceed to exaggerate the evils that exist in the most 
brazen-faced manner and to magnify the evils they 
imagine to the utmost extent. They generously en- 
large every iniquity that is and fully describe those 
that have never been; they complicate every simple 
problem in order to puzzle mankind and to be mis- 
understood and to appear great. The world has be- 
come so civilized, the reformers reason, or rather 
think, that it is hard to find its monstrous wrongs and 
social reform are being forgotten, and so out with our 
telescopes, magnifying glasses and alarm clocks. The 
capitalists must be dethroned, the down-trodden 
wage-slave must be enthroned, and then our saviors 
riot and revel in their never-ending disquisitions. 
Yes, when there are many reformers in the world, 
the world is in sore need of reform. 
" These people are pitifully short-sighted and can 

i68 



Social Reformers Should be Abolished 

barely see one side of life at a time; they dissed: life 
and remove it from reality. Their solutions are so 
fine that they have nothing to do with the real prob- 
lems. They detach humanity from the world. They 
abolish the concrete (for convenience) and get lost 
in their abstractions like the detective who disguised 
himself so much that he could not discover his own 
identity. They conceive more evil than exists be- 
cause they rarely know the difference between right 
and wrong. They are visionaries without breadth of 
visions ; theorists, not knowing the uselessness of all 
theories ; people who would save the world because 
they do not know it ; builders without a foundation ; 
saviors without the saving graces of truth and beau- 
ty.They embitter humanity, they darken the world, 
painting it blacker than it ever was in the barbaric 
past and — they make me weary, the more so be- 
cause they constantly remind me how foolish I once 
was myself. 

" 1 tell you, the world is better to-day than it ever 
was before, and it would become still better if we 
could abolish these disparaging, discouraging, slan- 
derous social reformers. The true reformers are those 
who make us see how good and great the old world 
is. As you said the other day, the greatest explorers 
were those who discovered heaven on earth. And 
after we have abolished the reformers we could grad- 
ually also abolish the other evils which afflid: our 
civilization and mar existence. They would no longer 
impede our progress and we could little by little 

169 



Discourses of Keidansky 

wipe out the wrongs that oppress us and institute 
more just conditions for all members of society. 
These things could be done gradually, reasonably, 
with good cheer, and with the best results. For an- 
other trouble with the vaudeville social reformers 
that I did not mention is their overweening, over- 
whelming conceit, which makes them so ludicrously 
unreasonable and prevents them from seeing that 
the world is just a trifle bigger than one of their 
numbers." 

It was nearing dawn, and I asked him how he was 
going to do away with the reformers. 
" Well, there 's the rub," he said. " I do not know 
exa6tly, but 1 Ve been thinking that perhaps the 
only and best way of abolishing the social reformers 
would be by finding the true solution of the social 
problem and abolishing all the wrongs and iniquities 
of our civilization. Let us destroy, annihilate the 
evils of unjust laws, governments and monopolies, 
and institute a just system of society and the social 
reformers will disappear. 

"Let us have a society wherein all will share equally 
in all the joys and sorrows of life, wherein none shall 
be starved and none shall be pampered to death, 
wherein none shall have too much of the goods of 
the world and all shall have enough, wherein no 
hungry babes will wallow in the gutters to become 
candidates for the prisons and insane asylums, and 
no children shall be ruined by riches ; a world where- 
in there will be no temperance movements to drive 

170 



Social Reformers Should be Abolished 

men to drink, no trust to destroy men's souls, and 
no churches to harbor infidels ; a world without the 
constant clouds of harrowing, sad thoughts, without 
the rains of tears, and with more and more of sun- 
shine. Let us do that and we will abolish the obnox- 
ious reformers. Let us abolish the monstrous crime 
of poverty, which has not the shadow of a reason for 
existence in a world that is overwhelmed with wealth, 
and the occupation of the reformers will be gone, 
and they will vanish. Really, we ought to be willing 
and ready to do anything for their abolition." 



171 



XIX 

Buying a Book in Salem Street 

I AM going to buy a book on Salem street/' 
said my friend, when we suddenly encountered 
on Tremont Row. " Do you wish to come 
along?" 

I was bent on any adventure, and so we started for 
the quarter, down through Hanover street. It was 
but a short distance, and before we had done much 
chatting in the way of exchanging ideas, we were at 
the head of the street, facing the pawnshop of No. 
I, with the welcome legend of" Money to Loan." 
We passed safely the bedecked and bedraggled sec- 
ond-hand clothing stores, though the pullers-in were 
out in full force. As my companion explained, it is 
only the seeming strangers who are approached and 
asked to buy, or sell, but familiar figures and per- 
sons in their company are never molested. One of 
these attendants, a dark, sad-eyed, kind-faced young 
man, was leaning against the door-post of a store 
and intently reading a Jewish magazine. We were 
across the street and we stopped to look. This fel- 
low, who was engaged in the most sordid business, 
was reading the " Zukunft," the magazine of dreams, 
ideals and Utopias, published by the New York radi- 
cals. An elderly, bearded and stout man came down 
the street. Without looking up from his booklet the 
youth mechanically asked: "Any clothing to-day?" 

173 



Discourses of Keidansky 

" No," the man shouted, " no clothing to-day, and 
you '11 never sell anything if this is the way you '11 
attend to your business." It was the proprietor of 
the store. For a moment the puller-in seemed dazed. 
Then he shoved his " Zukunft " into his coat pocket. 
He began to cast his eyes about for customers. He 
looked a model of sorrow. I was told that it was his 
idealism, his striving for the impossible, beautiful, 
that reduced him to the ugly position he was in. We 
moved on. There were other men reading, if only in 
snatches, but they apparently owned their stores and 
had their assistants. One of the pullers pointed out 
to me is one of the most enthusiastic Zionists in this 
city. Children were playing on sidewalks and door- 
steps, sedately but happily. A school-teacher from 
one of the neighboring institutions passed through 
the street. Several little girls recognized and flocked 
about her. One took the teacher's umbrella, the oth- 
er asked for the privilege of carrying the young la- 
dy's Boston bag. They took hold of her arms and 
went along dancing and smiling as she talked to 
them. Above the rumbling of wagons were heard 
the pleasing notes of a piano and the singing of a 
sweet-voiced daughter of the tenements. 
Farther up the street was more crowded. It was 
Thursday afternoon. The stores were all adlivityand 
bustle, and the pedlers with their wagons and push- 
carts were crying their foods and wares for " the 
Holy Sabbath " in quaint and singing Yiddish 
phrases. I was reminded by my friend that Abraham 

174 



Buying a Book in Salem Street 

Goldfoden, the father of the Jewish stage, in one of 
his operettas uses a swarming, eve-of-Sabbath mar- 
ket-scene like this very efFedively, and makes his 
hucksters sing beautifully of the things they have to 
sell. Said my guide : " Of course, in the operetta of 
' The Witch ' the pedlers are not so ragged and be- 
smeared, and you cannot hear the smell of the meat 
and the fish, but neither can you buy and eat these 
things. After all, if art is beautiful, real life is quite 
useful. 

" To our people," said Keidansky, casting his eyes 
about, " everything here is a matter of course, and 
there is nothing unusual about it all. The strang- 
est things are the strangers, who come to stare, 
study and wonder. In fa6t, the self-concentration of 
the Jew, probably the secret of his survival, makes 
this the only place in the world, the temporary Pal- 
estine, the centre of the universe. There are other 
places in this city, but they are only the outskirts, the 
suburbs of the Ghetto. There are other peoples and 
religions, but we are the people and ours is the faith. 
The flattery that children receive from their parents 
afterwards helps them to bear the brunt of the bat- 
tle. The consciousness of his being chosen helped 
Israel to find his way through the dark labyrinth of 
the centuries. Everything here is as it should be, 
only a little more on the exclusive and pious Euro- 
pean plan. This is more of the old fashioned view, 
but it is still extant, inasmuch as the Ghetto remains." 
Now we were near Bersowsky's book-store which 

175 



Discourses of Keidansky 

was on the other side of the street and we stopped, 
facing it. A street-organ was playing in front of the 
strange emporium and a bandof children were danc- 
ing gayly to its music. We could see the books and 
periodicals,phylad:eriesandnewspapers, holy fringe- 
garments and sheets of Jewish music in the windows 
from the other side of the street. And as we came 
nearer we could see the very aged woman, bewigged 
and kerchiefed, wan, wrinkled and wry — the most 
familiar figure in the Ghetto — we could see her sit- 
ting on her high stool, drinking a glass of tea and 
selling newspapers. There were several simple prints 
and chromos in the window, reproductions from pic- 
tures of Jewish life. Parents blessing their children 
on the Day of Atonement, the Feast of Passover, 
high priests lighting the candles in the temple — 
these were their subjec5ts. In the windows were also 
brass candlesticks, such as are being lighted and 
blessed on the eve of each Sabbath.We stood outside 
and mused. 

"This," Keidansky explained, "is the leading Jew- 
ish book-store in Boston, and it is in a sense also the 
spiritual centre of this Ghetto. If any one were to ask 
me what is to-day the moral condition of the Jews, 
their spiritual state, what are their intelledual status 
and religious aspirations, if any one should ask me 
— I would take them into this store and let them see 
what it contains. Religion, history, literature — it is 
all in here — at least in all its physical manifestations. 
Pentateuchs, Bibles, prayer-books, all books of re- 

176 



Buying a Book in Salem Street 

ligious instrudlion, books of piety and penance, vol- 
umes of the Talmud and of Mishna, phyladeries 
and holy scrolls, covers for the scrolls and curtains 
for the Holy Ark, ram*s horns to sound on New 
Year's, knives wherewith to kill cattle according to a 
merciful ritual, candle-sticks and show-threads which 
the Jews were commanded to wear at the bottom of 
their garments (and some of them now wear under 
their garments) — in a word, all that stands to pre- 
serve the old faith is here. All the symbolism of our 
old faith is here incarnated. And yet side by side with 
these are the things which tend towards the trans- 
formation or dissolution of the ancient religion — 
the publications of the radicals, the destroying utter- 
ances of the revolutionists. Here come the ortho- 
dox for prayer-books and the anti-religious for free- 
thought pamphlets. Here you find the organs of the 
patriots and Zionists, who wish to preserve and re- 
generate the Jewish people, and also the organs of 
the Socialists and Anarchists who are fighting against 
all national ideas and for an assimilated humanity. 
Come in and I '11 show you. There is the 'Zukunft' 
(Future), the best literary and scientific monthly we 
ever had, which is published by the SociaHsts. It was 
formerly edited by Abe Cahan, now Dr. Caspe has 
charge of it. And look ! ' Die Freie Arbeiter Stim- 
me,' the Anarchist weekly, ably edited by S. Yan- 
ofsky, one of the cleverest Yiddish writers. 
"And," my friend whispered, "this old lady, who 
stands for all that is pious and ancient, handing 

177 



Discourses of Keidansky 

out the 'Freie Arbeiter Stimme' and the Socialist 
'Vorwarts/ is to me as strongly dramatic and as 
profoundly symbolic a picture as anything in life and 
literature. Mr. Bersowsky, who started this store, 
now sells books, it is hoped, in a better world. Look 
at this young old woman — his widow — and see if 
hearts ever break around here. The aged lady is his 
mother, and she would not be in any other place in 
the world, except where her husband, and afterwards 
her son spent their last days. So she stays here all 
the time the store is open,and sells papers and books 
in spite of protests. 

" The Jew is so practical that he always looks ahead ; 
he is chronically optimistic, and his imagination cre- 
ates everything that the world denies him. Dreamer 
he has been ever since the prophets,and even before 
their time. It must have been superb idealism and 
beautiful faith which enabled him to loan money 
to his neighbors during the Middle Ages. It still re- 
quires fine imagination to do it to-day. 
" Between the sordid and the sublime stands the 
Jew, who is either one or the other, or both, as cir- 
cumstances shape his destiny. You can see this in 
all his literature, from the stories of Motke Chabad 
to the plays of Jacob Gordin. 
"Is it not strange how quickly we adapt ourselves, 
and how soon we come up to date and ahead of 
date? But yesterday we had no literature except our 
religious guides, our only beacon lights in the old- 
world Ghettos; and now we have splendid modern 

178 



Buying a Book in Salem Street 

works, both in Hebrew and Yiddish, all breathing 
the modern spirit. Many standard works from all 
European tongues have been translated for us; but 
we have a number of great masters of our own. It 
is such a short time ago that we had no fidion to 
speak of us (except the sermons of our preachers); 
and now there is Abromowitz and Peretz, Spedor 
and Rubenowitz, and so many others. There is a 
whole group of modern poets, who have also grown 
up in no time. And the struggle between the old 
and the new, which this literature represents, the 
striving for the modern, and the longing for the an- 
cient — that is what makes it so painful and pleasant 
— so stirring, and therefore uch good art. All grades 
of feeling and believing, thinking and non-thinking, 
are in the books and periodicals that you find in 
this store. And the men and women who come here, 
living in the same Ghetto, are often millions of 
miles apart in their ideas." 

My guide asked for his book, a Hebrew story, by 
L. M. Lillenblum. The elderly man, who is a rela- 
tive of the family and a partner in the business, 
knew all about it, found it after a long search, and 
made my friend happy. The story, I was told, was 
written about twenty years ago by a native of Kei- 
dan. At that time there was a general literary awak- 
ening, and many talented men wrote profane and 
useful books in the holy language, and shocked the 
orthodox Jews of Russia. In Keidan, they wanted 
to excommunicate the author of "The Follies of 

179 



Discourses of Keidansky 

My Youth"; but the rabbi of Kovno telegraphed, 
saying that the infidel was a great man, and should 
be left alone — with his book. An old man came in, 
and after much bargaining, bought a silk praying- 
shawl. Several persons came in for papers. A young 
man bought the "Zukunft" and "The Merchant 
of Venice" translated in blank verse, by Joseph 
Bovshover. 

He wore glasses, long hair, carried an umbrella and 
a green bag; in fad, one might have met him in a 
vegetarian restaurant. He was pointed out to me as 
a noted radical, a dreamer, who writes for the " Vor- 
warts," works as a tailor in a sweat-shop, and is said 
to be writing a book. A comely young maiden, with 
a madonna-like face, came near the store. She had a 
few mayflowers in her hand — and gave them to a 
ragged little child standing there. She came in and 
bought a paper. She did not read Yiddish; but it 
was for her father. She was a college student, I was 
told, of advanced ideas, but deeply in love with the 
people of the Ghetto and their beliefs — was plan- 
ning to devote her life to settlements and social re- 
form work — one of the many dreamers who came 
into this store. 

" Once," said my guide, " I told her that I would 
put her into a book. 'Thank you,' she answered. 
'I don't want to sink into oblivion so soon.' But 
she is an idyl of the Ghetto just the same. Look; 
here are the poems of David Edelstaat. He sleeps 
now in a lonely grave in the Jewish cemetery at 

1 80 



Buying a Book in Salem Street 

Denver, Colorado, by the side of the fence, for he 
was a dehnquent in Israel. He went there by way of 
the corroding sweat-shop and a damp cellar in New 
York, where he edited a little communist weekly. 
Many of our idealists go to Denver this way. It is 
the only time they travel and take a vacation. The 
hospitals there are crowded. But Edelstaat's poems, 
they are a sacred treasure among the Jewish work- 
ing people." 



i8i 



XX 

'The Purpose of Immoral Plays 

THE smoke was so thick and the din so 
heavy, that I did not see him when I came 
in and barely heard his shouted greeting. 
Such was the crowded condition of the regular re- 
sort on Saturday night; yet I found Keidansky 
tucked up in a corner of the cafe, "oblivious to the 
obvious,'* around him, with a pile of newspapers in 
his hands. " The group" had not as yet assembled, 
so my friend was reading. 

"This has been a great week," he said with glad- 
some emphasis, after we had exchanged courtesies. 
I at once suspedled what he meant. 
"A great week," I said, "because you have been 
able to see humanity piteously dissedled, human be- 
ings mercilessly analyzed, souls stript of their rai- 
ment, wounded and bleeding, our fellow-men on 
exhibition, crippled by custom and walking on 
the crutches of convention, our best arrangements 
of life held up to ridicule and scorn. A great week," 
I said, " because you have fed on tragedy like a 
fiend?" 

"Yes, there is something sad about tragedy," an- 
swered Keidansky, ignoring my bitterness, "but the 
man who sees things clearly, who looks a long dis- 
tance behind the scenes, the man who sees the worst 
and does not die, but lives to cast his observations 

183 



Discourses of Keidansky 

into a perfed work, and to lift you up to the moun- 
tain-top with him, is not this man great and glad- 
dening? Is there not cause for exultation in a really 
big tragedy? And this is saying but little about the 
aesthetic pleasure of a story told in heart-breaking 
and soul-stirring manner," he added. "Some one 
must do this work, and it makes one feel real good 
when the right man comes along. 
" The saddest stories are yet to be told, before there 
can be much more happiness in the world. We can 
never reach the heights until we realize the depths. 
As for myself, I give all the world to the man who 
can make it better than it is. And such works are 
making the longed-for improvement, by perform- 
ing the miracle of making men and women think, 
doing this, not by any pedantic preachments, but 
by the power of suggestiveness and the large vision 
of the newer and truer art. Art with a purpose? But 
all art has this purpose. And the less the purpose 
is consciously inculcated into art, the better is that 
purpose carried out. They call them problem plays, 
but was there ever a great play without some sort 
of problem in it? Without some burning question 
of Hfe, and love, and death? What's that? Immoral? 
Was there ever a masterly and mastering work that 
was not immoral, according to the popular judg- 
ments ? Was there ever a work with a big purpose 
that conformed to the critics and to current lack of 
opinions? Could there be much of a purpose to any- 
thing that did not shock the world's conspiracy of 

184 



"The Purpose of Immoral Plays 

cowardice they call morality? Gott is mit dirl You 
must go abroad and take some cure. You have been 
reading the American dramatic critics. It was a great 
week, I say, with Ibsen and Bjornson, Sudermann 
and Pinero, and two wonderful artists to interpret 
them, but the pleasure was very much spoiled for 
me by some of these critics. Ah, these poor critics. 
Here are the papers, and I can still hear them chok- 
ing and croaking and cackling, and my heart goes out 
to them and turns sick. What a wonderful lot of fel- 
lows they are. What endless platitudes and empty 
phrases — full of nonsense — they have delivered 
themselves of this week, yet I don't think they are 
any the wiser for it. I know one of the fraternity 
(there is sufficient disagreement between themselves 
to be called a fraternity) who is a perfe6t genius. 
With one stroke of his mighty pen he once anni- 
hilated Ibsen, Echegaray, Astrowsky, Paul Her- 
vieueand Edward Martyn. It was all 'morbid trash,' 
he said of a series of their plays, and it is strange 
that these men are still heard of occasionally. That 
was after the John Blair experiment, and I walked 
into this critic's office and made a few extempora- 
neous remarks. He said I ought to have more re- 
sped for a man who can get as much advertising 
for his paper as he can. Of course, this was indis- 
putable. It would take so little courage to do it, 
yet they dare not think their own thoughts, the dear, 
dear critics. No, there is not any use in trying to 
reason with them, but I sometimes would like to get 

185 



Discourses of Keidansky 

them all together in one room and give them all a 
sound horsewhipping. 

"One of the critics, who writes in silk gloves, 
swears in the most perfe6l, corred; English, and 
compares every play he sees to something of Shake- 
speare, objedls to 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray* 
as an immoral play. The dissection of this woman's 
heart and mind, he protests, is not the proper busi- 
ness of the dramatist, nor is the inspection of his 
dissecting table after the job has been done a proper 
amusement for theatrical spectators. 'A process of 
repentance and purification' and that sort of thing, 
on the part of this unfortunate, must be indicated, 
if art is to approach this kind of life. The entire 
scheme of ethics is bad. Yet the critic admits that 
the performance was terrible and touching, and that 
Mrs. Campbell — Heaven bless her for coming to 
see us — won a remarkable and complete victory in 
the part; altogether he praises her very generously. 
"Now, what I say is this. If we can be moved and 
stirred by an immoral play, there is either something 
the matter with our morality, or there is some- 
thing radically wrong with our hearts. I must re- 
call to you the lines of Stephen Crane. 'Behold the 
grave of a wicked man, and near is a stern spirit. 
There came a drooping maid with violets, but the 
spirit grasped her arm. "No flowers for him," he 
said. The maid wept: "Oh, I loved him." But the 
spirit grim and frowning: "No flowers for him." 
Now, this is it. If the spirit was just, why did the 

i86 



The Purpose of Immoral Plays 

maid weep?' If our standard of morality is right, 
why do our hearts go out for Paula Tanqueray, for 
Nora Helmer, for Mad Agnes? Is it because we 
have become so humane as to be far ahead of our 
morality? What does it mean, anyway? We are told 
that the contents of the plays seen here last week, 
are not fit subjects for the drama. Well, art might 
as well go out of business, if it is not going to look 
life squarely in the face, if it is not going to sound 
the very depths of things, and mirror conditions as 
they are to-day, for modern humanity. The play in 
particular, it is clear, must deal with the intense ef- 
forts, the dramatic essences of life ; the play in par- 
ticular will have nothing to do unless it takes up 
the crucial conditions, the large realities, the stir- 
ring struggles, the sterling aspirations of the clashing 
life of to-day under the new and as yet unadjusted 
surroundings. The drama must take up shame and 
crime, error and suffering, or there is no plot for a 
great play anywhere. The few pretty, romantic, silly 
stories have been told over and over again. Now we 
have grown. There is a larger life before us, and we 
want something stronger. We must have plays to 
educate our critics, — if that is possible. 
" ' He who is without sin among ye, let him cast the 
first stone.' If Christ had said nothing else, would 
not this have made him a great man ? Yet after eight- 
een hundred years it is necessary for another Jew, 
a Portuguese Jew named Pinero, to say the same 
thing through the medium of a play, because the 

187 



Discourses of Keidansky 

Christians say that Christ's teachings are immoral. 
And then the stones of the critics are thrown at Pi- 
nero." 

Here I said something about the relation between 
art and morality, but Keidansky protested. 
" Art has nothing to do with morality," he said, 
" and therefore it teaches such great moral lessons. 
It re-creates and reproduces Nature and life in forms 
of beauty and power. And because it approaches ele- 
mentary conditions without bias and preconceived 
notions, and illumines its material with the touch of 
human genius, it shows us life in its largeness, right 
in its relativeness, and raises us above our established 
moralities. Because art is the spontaneous expres- 
sion of the humane, the true, the good and the beau- 
tiful in our souls, it helps us to see the larger rights, 
the greater justice, and helps us to make, change and 
advance our morality. Art touches the commonplace 
and makes it divine. It makes a saint out of a sin- 
ner by showing causes, and casting a kindly light 
over human weakness. 

"In real life 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray ' is a 
shameful scandal, to be exploited by sensational 
newspapers, and we avoid the parties concerned and 
run away from them ; but art raises the story to the 
height of the tragic and the epic, and we suffer and 
grieve with Paula, and even the cold critic, who tries 
so hard not to be humane, is moved. In life we are 
even afraid to mention the names of such people; 
but art makes us weep for Camille, sympathize with 

i88 



'The Purpose of Immoral Plays 

Sapho, be sad, or gay, with the vagabond Fran9ois 
Villon, sigh for Denise, grieve with Don Jose, and 
follow Manon Lescaut through the desert of North 
America. Art helps us to realize that there is no sin 
but error, no degradation but dulness of the mind, 
no vice but lack of vision. 

" I don't want to speak to you because you did not 
go to see Bjornson's ' Beyond Human Power ' and 
Mrs. Campbell's a6ting in that piece. Yet since you 
did not go you ought to be enlightened. You have 
read the story ? Did you see how the critics dodged 
the issues of the play, beating about the bush and 
puzzling each other P A case of faith and reason, 
you know, and you must n't talk about these things. 
A blind leader of the blind, a man who ' lacks the 
sense of reality ' and sees only what he wishes to see ; 
a woman of intellect who wastes her love on him ; 
unbelieving children of a miracle worker; the clash 
between the new and the old; the decrepitude of 
orthodoxy ; the contrast between the master and his 
disciples and who can never realize the impossible, 
unnatural ideals ; the faith that kills. The play has 
all the tragedy of a dying religion, and the last ad: is 
as powerful as anything I have ever seen anywhere. 
What does it mean ? To me it indicates the dying of 
the old Christianity, and I believe that Bjornson, 
unlike Ibsen, is a Christian. The quiet, subdued, 
subtle work of Mrs. Campbell was worthy of the 
play. 

"And there was Henrik Ibsen's 'A Doll's House.* 

189 



Discourses of Keidansky 

I shall never forget the performance of it. What a 
simple story, how concise and terse, not a superflu- 
ous word in the whole of it, yet how strong and stir- 
ring! It is primarily a pid:ure, a powerful dramatic 
pid:ure without a shadow of preachiness in it. You 
say there is a problem in it? Yes, but it 's in the pic- 
ture, the picture is the problem. Here is a perfe6t 
work of a great master, if there ever was one. There 
are whole cities made up of such dolls' houses, with 
women as playthings, toys, means of amusement, 
slaves of conventionality and of slavish men, yet the 
critics are croaking and raising the cry of * immoral- 
ity.' Save on the New York East Side Ghetto, Ib- 
sen is comparatively unknown in America, but it is 
not true that the American people are not interested 
in his plays whenever they are given and that they 
would not go to see them if more of them were per- 
formed. In saying so the critics say what is not true, 
as was manifest from the enthusiastic audiences at 
the last week's performances. There is a Yiddish 
translation of the play by the poet Morris Winchew- 
sky, and it was performed by Mr. and Mrs. Jacob 
P. Adler, but I have never seen it. Mrs. Fiske's 
' Nora ' is positively great. Her delicacy, her mastery 
of light and shade, her manner of speech and poise, 
and on the whole her perfed conception of the char- 
ader is a stroke of genius. Why did you not see it ? 
Do you want to go ? You can pay for my lunch. 
Ibsen and Bjornson have impoverished me this 
week." 

190 



The Purpose of Immoral Plays 

" So you don't think much of the American critics ? " 
I asked at this point. 

"On the contrary," he said, "with the exception of 
some, I think they are all good advertising agents." 



191 



XXI 
The Poet and the Problem 

THIS time I met Keidansky in front of the 
Jewish theatre. He had just left the re- 
hearsal of a play which he had translated 
from the German into Yiddish. As I approached he 
pointed to a huge sign on top of the building across 
the street advertising, in a pretty jingle of rhymes, a 
new biscuit of undreamed of deliciousness. 
" I have solved the problem," he said proudly. This 
was not such a surprise to me. To solve problems 
was my friend's business. 
"What problem is that?" I asked. 
" The problem of the poet," he answered. "After the 
ages of oppression, persecution and poverty, after the 
exiles, insults and negligence of centuries, the poet 
will at last come into his own, into bread and butter 
and a respected position in society. Immunity from 
starvation, peace, prosperity will at last be his. His 
worth will be recognized and he will be put to work 
and made a useful member of society." 
"What will he do?" I asked. 

"He will write the advertisements for manufacturers 
andstorekeepers," said Keidansky ; " he will sing the 
song of the products of modern industry, chant of the 
wonderful performances of the age and glorify the 
fruits of our civilization, extol the things of use and 
of beauty that serve the needs of to-day's humanity. 



Discourses of Keidansky 

This will be an ample theme for his Muse and the 
guerdon of his songwill be tangible. His talents will 
serve a great practical need. He will prove at last 
that there is some advantage in genius. The world, 
the world of reality, of fa6ts, figures and statistics 
will no longer ask, 'What's the use of poetry ?' The 
world will recognize its usefulness, and commerce 
and trade and capital shall become its friends. In 
graceful rhymes, in silvery stanzas, in beautiful 
verses will the poet voice the marvels of all the re- 
sults of the inventiveness, ingenuity and skill with 
which our era is so richly blessed. And whatever ar- 
ticle on the market will be the burden of his song, 
it will bring good prices and make easy the life of the 
singer. And people will no longer have to strain their 
eyes to find the poet's lines in an obscure corner of 
a magazine, or in a little volume of tiny type ; the 
bards will no longer have to depend upon such poor 
methods of attra6ting attention. 
"In great, glaring, garish and golden letters their 
poems will look down upon people from the roof- 
tops, from the high walls of fad:ories and barns, 
from fences and huge signs by all the roadsides, rail- 
road sides, mountain sides, seasides, and all sides, 
and people will be compelled to look up to them, 
because there will be nowhere else to look. There 
will be no escape. The large letters painted in glow- 
ing colors and with their artistic arrangement will 
arrest the attention of all. And when a foreigner will 
come here to study this country and write it up, he 

194 



The Poet and the Problem 

will not be able to see anything on account of these 
signs which will cover the land, and after reading 
the inscriptions upon them, he will go forth saying 
that it is the most poetic country in the whole world. 
So inspired will the stranger become that he will go 
forth and tell the world of the wonderful things we 
make and advertise here. Thus poetry, at last, be- 
come useful, will help us conquer the foreign mar- 
ket. After all, the bards will come down from the 
clouds and the garrets of starvation, and in their 
song embrace the whole world; celebrate the things 
concrete, material and real. Poetry and the world will 
at last become reconciled; spirit and substance will 
be united to the practical advantage of the spirit. 
" For too long a time has the poet wandered about 
in distress, begging for a pittance, persecuted every- 
where, singing his song for nothing, with starvation 
and inspiration as his only rewards. For too long a 
time has the poet, 'the unacknowledged legislator 
of the world,* been subjedled to all manner of scorn, 
persecution, calumny, and been compelled to seek in 
vain some one who will pay well for a dedication of 
his work. His own lot was ever hard, and, besides, 
he suffered all the sorrows of humanity. He lived 
with all and grieved with all. He put his life into his 
songs, yet few paid any heed to them. Poets have ever 
been the vidims of the prosiness ofthings. The world 
was ever ugly to them because they made it so beauti- 
ful. No matter how great their immortality, they 
never could pay their rent. 'A genius is an accused 

195 



Discourses of Keidansky 

man/ said Vidor Hugo in his book on Shakespeare, 
and then he goes on to enumerate all the banish- 
ments, persecutions, imprisonments and outrages 
that were heaped upon the poets of all lands and all 
ages, including Vidlor Hugo himself. Yes, a poet has 
ever been an accused man, and nearly every one has 
found him guilty. But as I say, these cruelties had for 
too long been practised upon the singers and the time 
has come for a change. With the advance of civiliza- 
tion he will be given useful employment, a decent 
wage, and thus enabled to make a living without 
working overtime. Richard LeGallienne shall weep 
no more for a government endowment for the poet. 
The poet shall become self-supporting. He will sing 
of things whereof the owners can afford to pay for 
the song. Whether he will create immortal works 
or not he will work, and work is immortal. It will 
continue unto the end of time." 
Here I wished to remonstrate, but Keidansky would 
not permit me. He continued, as we walked along 
through the Ghetto. 

"The human and other machines of the age are 
bringing such wonderful things into existence, and 
the poet will lift his voice in praise of them. It real- 
ly takes the imagination of a poet to pid:ure and glo- 
rify the countless commodities that are manufac- 
tured and put upon the markets of our time. 1 1 takes a 
poet to point out their usefulness. What will he not 
sing of on those huge street signs and in the double- 
page advertisements in the newspapers ? Of pre-di- 

196 



The Poet and the Problem 

gested foods, of squeezeless corsets, of baking pow- 
der that bakes the cakes without any form of heat, 
of ink that endows the pen with brains, of cigars 
that are conducive to health, of watches that make 
people up to date, of a hair restorer that keeps the 
hair you have, of shoes with which you can walk in 
the air, of clothes that make man and woman out of 
nothing, pianos that make Paderewskys, of bicycles 
and typewriters, and razors and house-lots and fur- 
niture, and peerless, rare, surpassing, extraordinary 
everything mentionable. What will he not sing of? 
These things will be. God will send us a Bobby 
Burns and he will sing the song of the best steam- 
ship company, and he will not only be able to go a- 
broad often, but he may in the course of time even be- 
come the general passenger agent. It takes a compe- 
tent fortune to escape the materialism of the age, and 
to acquire this the poet will associate himself with 
the material interests of the time and become as free 
as a bird in the woods. 

" The process has begun, and already one finds pret- 
ty little poems and fine sentiments in all advertise- 
ments, particularly those that meet one's eyes in the 
street cars. I usually have a book with me on the cars, 
but of late I find the advertisements more amus- 
ing. Pretty soon the best literature will appear in 
the advertisements of all publications. One firm 
advertises in choice epigrams, which show the possi- 
bilities for some future wits. I do not know whether 
they are written by Elbert Hubbard or not, but 

197 



Discourses of Keidansky 

they sound like it and show which way things are 
going. ^ 

"This is the solution of the problem of the poet. I 
pondered over it long, but found it at last. Our hope 
comes from Parnassus. The poets will help us con- 
quer the foreign market.*' 



198 



XXII 

''My Vacation on the East Side " 



cc 



G 



REEN fields, fair forests, singing streams, 
pine-clad mountains, verdant vistas — from 
the monotony of the city to the monotony 
of nature. I wanted a complete change, and so I went 
to the East Side of New York for my vacation. That 
is where I have been." 

Thus did our friend explain his strange disappear- 
ance and unusual absence from Boston for a whole 
week. For the first time since he came here from 
New York he had been missing from his home, his 
regular haunts, such as the cafes, Jewish book-stores 
and the debating club, and none of those whom I 
asked knew whither he had betaken himself. The 
dired: cause of his disappearance, explained Keidan- 
sky, was a railroad pass, which he had secured from 
a friendly editor for whom he had done some work. 
He went on explaining. " I wanted to break away 
for awhile from the sameness and solemnness, the 
routine and respectability of this town, from my 
weary idleness, empty labors, and uniformity of our 
ideas here, so when the opportunity was available I 
took a little journey to the big metropolis. One be- 
comes rusty and falls into a rut in this suburb. I was 
becoming so sedate, stale and quiet that I was begin- 
ning to be afraid of myself The revolutionary spirit 
has somewhat subsided. Many of the comrades have 

199 



Discourses of Keidansky 

gone back on their ideas, have begun to pra6lise what 
they preach, to improve their conditions by going 
into business and into work, and I often feel lonely. 
Anti-imperialism, Christian Science and the New 
Thought are amusing; but there is not enough ex- 
citement here. Boston is not progressive; there are 
not enough foreigners in this city. People from many 
lands with all sorts of ideas and the friction that arises 
between them — that causes progress. New York is 
the place, and it is also the refuge of all radicals, rev- 
olutionaries and good people whom the wicked old 
world has cast out. America, to retain its originalchar- 
adler, must constantly be replenished by hounded 
refugees and viftims of persecution in despotic lands. 
To remain lovers of freedom we must have suffer- 
ers from oppression with us. Sad commentary, this, 
upon our human nature ; but so are nearly all com- 
mentaries upon human nature. Commentaries upon 
the superhuman are tragic. New York with its Ger- 
mans and Russians and Jews is a characteristic Amer- 
ica n city. Boston and other places are too much like 
Europe — cold, narrow and provincial. I came to 
Boston some time ago because I had relatives here 
— the last reason in the world why any one should 
go anywhere ; but I was ignorant and superstitious 
in those days. I have since managed to emancipate 
myself, more or less, from the baneful influences of 
those near ; but meanwhile I have established my- 
self, have become interested in the movements and 
institutions of the community, and here I am. The 

200 



''My Vacation on the East Side"" 

symphony concerts, the radical movement, the li- 
brary, ledlures on art, the sunsets over the Charles 
River, the Faneuil Hall protest meetings against 
everything that continues to be, the literary paper 
published, the Atlantic Monthly, Gamelial Brad- 
ford, Philip Hale and so many other fixtures of Bos- 
ton have since endeared it to me and I stayed. Be- 
sides, it would cost me too much to ship all my books 
to New York. 

" But wishing a change, I wanted to go to the big 
metropolis. No, not to the country ; not for me those 
parasitic, pestering and polished summer hotels, 
where a pile of people get together to gossip and 
giggle and gormandize and bore each other for sev- 
eral weeks. An accident once brought me to one of 
these places. I went out to see some friends, and I 
know what they are. They spend most of their time 
dressing ; these vacationists dress three times a day ; 
the green waist, and yellow waist, the brown skirt 
and the blue suit, the red jacket, the white hat, and 
the gray coat, and then the same turn over again ; 
they fill themselves with all sorts of heavy and un- 
wholesome foods brought from the cities ; they sit 
around the verandas and talk all day, never daring 
to venture into the woods ; they do no good to them- 
selves, coming home tired and sick, and they do un- 
speakable wrong by turning good, honest farmers 
into parasitic, sophisticated boarder-breeders, and 
by turning them away from the tilling of the soil. 
No more of these places for me. Of course, if one 

20I 



Discourses of Keidansky 

could go into the woods and live as simply as a sav- 
age for awhile itwould be fine ; but one needs a tent, 
and I never did own any real estate. 
" But this time I wanted a complete change; I want- 
ed something to move and stir me out of the given 
groove, the beaten path I was falling into, some ex- 
citement that would shake the cobwebs out of my 
brain, so I turned towards the East Side. 
" They are all there, the comrades, the radicals, the 
red ones, and dreamers; people who are free because 
they own nothing. Poets, philosophers, novelists, 
dramatists, artists, editors, agitators and other idle 
and useless beings, they form a great galaxy in the 
New York Ghetto. For several years, ever since I 
left New York, I had been receiving instruction and 
inspiration from them through the medium of the 
Yiddish and the Socialist press, where my own things 
often appeared beside their spirited outpourings, and 
now I was overcome by an overpowering desire to 
meet them again, talk matters over and fight it all 
out. There is no sham about the East Side branch 
of the ancient and most honorable order of Bohe- 
mians — the little changing, moving world that is 
flowing with the milk of human kindness and the 
honey of fraternal affe6Hons, where those who live 
may die and those who die may live. Here among 
the East Side Bohemians people feel freely, a6t in- 
dependently, speak as they think and are not at all 
ashamed of their feelings. They have courage. They 
wear their convictions in public. They do as they 

202 



"My Vacation on the East Side'' 

please, whether that pleases everybody else or not. 

They talk with the purpose of saying something. 

They write with the objed: of expressing their ideas. 

They tell the truth and shame those who do not. 

Hearts are warm because they own their souls. Those 

who really own their souls will never lose them. As 

Joseph Bovshover, the fine poet of the East Side 

has sung: 

^Beauty bidethy 
Nature chidethy 
When the heart is cold; 
Fame is galling^ 
Gold's enthralling^ 
When the mind is sold' 

" They all assemble in the cafes, those universities 
of the East Side, and in these places of judgment all 
things are determined. Is there a great world prob- 
lem that puzzles and vexes all mankind ? The de- 
baters at one of these tea-houses take it up at their 
earliest discussion and soon the problem is solved 
and the way of human progress is clear again. Is 
there a question that has troubled the ages ? Come 
and spend fifteen minutes on the East Side, and the 
salvation of humanity will be assured to you. There 
is so much squalor and suffering and sorrow here 
that nothing can overcome the optimism of these 
chosen people. Their incurable faith cannot be shak- 
en even by their religious leaders, and when they be- 
come atheists they are the most pious atheists in all 
the world. But in the cafes the great issues given up 

203 



Discourses of Keidansky 

in despair by famous statesmen are met and decided 
upon. The trusts ? Are they not paving the way for 
the reaUzation of SociaHsm ? Not until all the indus- 
tries have been concentrated by the trusts will the 
people through the government be able to take pos- 
session of them. Otherwise, how in the world will 
the new regime, for instance, ever organize and take 
hold of all the peanut stands of the land? You do 
not understand the question thoroughly if you have 
not read the articles of I. A. Hurwitz in the ' Vor- 
warts.* The future of war ? There will be no war in 
the future. The workingmen of all countries are 
uniting and so are the capitalists. The international 
movement is not laboring in vain. Socialism is 
spreading in the European armies. Every govern- 
ment will have enough trouble in its own land. Oth- 
ers come here and say that every government will 
have to fight for its own life and will not be able to 
do anything else. People will take Tolstoy's advice 
and cease to pay taxes and withdraw their support 
from the powers that rule. Tolstoy, say some, is a 
masterful artist, but puerile as a philosopher, a curi- 
ous mixture of genius and narrow-mindedness, a 
man, who once having erred, now sins against man- 
kind by denying it the right of erring. The red- 
haired ragged orator with blue eye-glasses and the 
face of a Hebrew Beethoven quotes Ingersoll. * Tol- 
stoy,' said the agnostic, ' stands with his back to the 
rising sun.' And did not Edward Carpenter say of 
Tolstoy's book, ^ that strange jumble of real acumen 

204 



"A/y Vacation on the East Side'' 

and bad logic, large-heartedness and fanaticism — 
What is art?' 

" Ibsen is somber because he is almost alone in see- 
ing the most tragic phases of life, because he feels 
compelled to treat what all other artists have neg- 
leded. Many of his plays are too much like life to be 
adled, and we go to the theatre only to see plays. 
One of the listeners speaks of the appreciation of Ib- 
sen in ' The New Spirit, ' by Havellock Ellis, and of 
the analogy that he finds between Ibsen and Whit- 
man. Zangwill places Ibsen above Shakespeare, and 
more recently he has bestowed great praise upon 
Hauptmann. Rather strange of Zangwill, who is 
himself not a realist and has gone in for Zionism, to 
like Ibsen so much. And who is greater than Ibsen ? 
some one asks. 'Perhaps it is I. Zangwill,' says the 
cynical, frowzy and frowning little journalist. G. 
Bernard Shaw is mentioned as a candidate, and his 
great little book on Ibsenism comes in for a heated 
discussion. Brandes is quoted, and several of his 
admirers present go into ecstasies over his works 
and almost forget the writers whom he has treated. 
The pale-faced, wistful-eyed poet with the Christ- 
like face rises high on the wings of his eloquence 
in praise of the Danish critic's appreciation of Heine, 
and Brandes is declared to be one of the greatest 
Jews in the world. What was it Brandes said about 
Zionism ? Zionism, Socialism and Anarchism come 
up in turn, and so many trenchant and vital things 
are said on these subjed:s. Will the novel pass away .f^ 

205 



Discourses of Keidansky 

The dramatist — bulky and bearded, impressive and 
strong-looking, with wonderful piercing eyes — the 
dramatist is inclined to think that it will. The short 
story is the story of the future. Long novels give 
one a glimpse of eternity. By the time you come to 
the last chapter, conditions have so changed in the 
world that you do not know whether the story is 
true to life or not. It is the necessarily historical, the 
long novel is. Old Jules Verne has won the East 
Side over with the fine words he has said on Guy De 
Maupassant. Some admirers of Z. Libin say that 
the Frenchman is too romantic, but on the whole 
he is the favorite story-writer. 'Yes,* says the Jewish 
ador, 'De Maupassant writes for all the Yiddish 
papers'; and in fa6i: all the East Side dailies have 
for years been treating their readers to his charming 
tales. He may be imagined to be a constant contrib- 
utor. Did not an old Israelite walk into the office 
of the 'Jewish Cry' and ask to see Friedrich Nie- 
tzsche? And then the problem of Nietzsche comes 
up ; whether he was, or was not a reaction against, or 
the opposite extreme from, the meekness of Chris- 
tianity, the weakness of his time. Wagner's music, 
Stephen Phillips's poetry, Zola's essay on realism, 
Maeterlinck's transcendentalism, Gorky's rise in let- 
ters, the Anglo-Saxon isolation in literature, Lud- 
wig Fuldas's latest play, all these things are decided 
upon by people who understand them, more or 
less. 
" I cannot tell you more, but these meetings and 

206 



'^My Vacation on the East Side'' 

these talks at various times and in various places 
made my vacation on the East Side delightful. Then 
there were lectures and meetings and social gather- 
ings of the comrades. The sun of new ideas rises on 
the East Side. Everywhere you meet people who are 
ready to fight for what they believe in and who do 
not believe in fighting. For a complete change and 
for pure air you must go among the people who 
think about something, have faith in something. 
Katz, Cahan, Gordin, Yanofsky, ZolotaroflFjHark- 
avy, Frumkin, Krantz, Zametkin, Zeifert, Lessin, 
Elisovitz, Winchevsky, Jeff, Leontief, Lipsky, 
Freidus, Frominson, Selikowitch, Palay, Barondess, 
and many other intelledual leaders, come into the 
cafes to pour out wisdom and drink tea, and here 
comes also Huchins Hapgood to get his education. 
Each man bears his own particular lantern, it is true, 
but each one carries a light and every one brings a 
man with him. 

"There was that memorial mass-meeting in honor 
of Hirsh Leckert, the Jewish shoemaker, who shot 
at the governor of Wilna, who took his life in hand 
to avenge a hideous outrage perpetrated upon his 
fellow-workers by a despicable despot. The Jewish 
working-people of Wilna organized a peaceful pro- 
cession, and at the behest of the governor hundreds 
of them were mercilessly flogged — flogged until 
they fainted, and when revived, flogged again. Then 
came this lowly hero, Leckert, and made a glorious 
ascent on the scaffold. In the afternoon news reached 

207 



Discourses of Keidansky 

the East Side that Leckert was hanged. The same 
evening the working-people, just out of their fado- 
ries and sweat-shops, in overwhelming numbers as- 
sembled in New Irving Hall, and the fervor and 
enthusiasm, the sobbing and the sighing, the tear- 
stained faces and love-lit eyes — the soul-stirring eu- 
logies delivered — I shall never forget it. I tell you 
no man ever saw anything greater or more inspiring 
on his vacation. 

"Mr. Jacob Gordin gave me a memorable treat, took 
me to see his latest and one of his best plays, 'Gott, 
Mensch, und der Teufel. ' I have seen many of his 
works and it is hard to decide which is the best be- 
cause they are nearly all so good. But this strange 
story of a Jewish Faust, the pious, saintly Jew who, 
tempted by Satan's gold, step by step loses his soul 
and cannot live without it; this wonderful blending 
of modern realism and supernatural symbolism, this 
superb summary of man and the new problem of life, 
the beauty and the strength of the work, is remark- 
able, to say the least. 'As in times of yore, ' says Satan, 
' the sons of Adam are divided into Abels and Cains. 
The former are constantly murdered and the latter 
are the constant murderers. Gracious Lord, in the 
new man there dwells the old savage Adam.' Sorry I 
cannot tell you more about it now, but the last words 
of the play have been ringing through my mind ever 
since I saw it. 

^ All must die^ all that is and lives ; 
Life alone is immortal. 

208 



"My Vacation on the East Side' 

That only is mortal that desires and strives^ 
"^he striving and the desire immortal.^ 

"Why," added Keidansky, as a final thunderbolt, " I 
have gained enough ideas on the East Side to last 
me here in Boston for ten years." 



209 



XXIII 

Our Rivals in FiBion 

" A FTER all, what is man when compared to the 
/\ hero of romance ? " asked Keidansky. " Be- 
X -A- side the dashing, dauntless, duelling cava- 
lier that now moves through the popular novel and 
struts our stage," he said, "the ordinary, mortal man 
of mere flesh and blood pales into insignificance. Be- 
side the extraordinary exploits of the storied hero, 
the doings of the every-day man are like the foolish 
games of little children, only not half so graceful. 
Beside the strange adventures of the leading charac- 
ter, the simple efforts of earthly man are accounted 
as naught. It would not be so bad if no one ever 
made comparisons, but women do, and so men are 
always found wanting, and have a harrowing time 
of it. 

"In the epic, the drama, the novel, the hero has 
nothing else to do but to make love, to deliver 
pretty speeches, perform remarkable feats and look 
graceful, and so he is ever so attractive. He plays 
upon the hearts, takes hold of the minds, fastens 
himself upon the imaginations of the gentle fair and 
fanciful. He knows just what to say, justwhat to do, 
and just where to go, just when to return, and is al- 
ways so punctual — appears just in the nick of time 
to save as many lives as are in danger. He becomes 
a model, a type, that the lady fair goes in quest of, 

211 



Discourses of Keidansky 

when the play is over, or the novel is ended. She 
turns to life for the realization. 
"In real life the young man has other things to do 
than making love, posing prettily, whispering sweet 
somethings, framing compliments and acting the 
gallant and defender of the fair and perfedly safe. 
He has other things to do than wearing fine clothes 
and winning smiles. In real life he has a real battle 
to fight. In real life he cannot always look neat, ad: 
aptly, prate loudly, and say the improper thing at 
the proper time. The improper thing at the proper 
time — that is the secret of genius. Things are not 
so smooth in life. The guidance of Providence is not 
so clear as are the directions of the playwright and 
novelist. Hard to tell just what to do, just what to 
say, just where to go, and just when to swear with 
impunity. Human beings are clumsy, awkward, un- 
couth. Life is an embarrassing affair. To observe all 
the niceties is madness, not to observe them is to be 
sent to a madhouse. What can a man do against his 
all-powerful rival in fiClion and the drama. His 
course is clear, but we walk in darkness. The ways 
of God are mysterious, the ways of men are crooked, 
and then — we are told to find the way. No matter 
how much you stand on ceremony you are likely to 
slip and fall anyway. Life is a labyrinth for which 
there is no specific geography. 
"To state the matter more definitely, the problem is 
this : A young man spends a half of his week's wages, 
takes the lady of his heart's desire to the theatre — 

212 



Our Rivals in FiSiion 

and she falls in love with the hero of the play — the 
omnipresent, omnipotent hero. His every look, 
every word, every gesture, every step, every ven- 
ture — it is just too lovely for anything. Oh, it is 
adorable, entrancing ! And the young man who took 
her to the theatre, the young man who really exists, 
what does he amount to ? What a puny dwarf he be- 
comes beside the great giant of the drama. Who can 
say things so sweetly, so smoothly, so sonorously, 
as the leading character or characters in a play ? Who 
can do things so neatly, so masterfully, and sur- 
mount such overwhelming difficulties in the twink- 
ling of an eye ? Such magnetic, magnanimous, ma- 
jestic figures ! It was after a pretty love scene on the 
stage that I once heard a lady sitting near me say to 
her companion, ' Oh, if some one would say " my 
dear " to me in that manner ! ' And perhaps the young 
lady will go all through life without finding the man, 
who will know enough to imitate that adior. 
"A young man buys the latest and most loudly ad- 
vertised historical novel and sends it to the lady of 
his dreams. On the next evening when he calls she 
is so absorbed, so immersed in the book that she 
hardly has anytime to speak to him. When she does 
look up from the tome she tells him all about the 
hair-raising hero. Count de Mar. ' He is a man,' she 
says, and so goes on to relate about his mighty ex- 
ploits. There is nothing worth while in all the world 
except a man like Count de Mar. Imagine, if you 
can, how the young man feels. And the lady chases 

213 



Discourses of Keidansky 

the phantom of Count de Mar in real life until she 
becomes a shadow of her former self, and the young 
man goes through existence cursing the historical 
novel in general and Count de Mar in particular. 
What else but misery should there be for mere man 
of mere reality ? What is he beside such lords of crea- 
tion as Count de Mar, Richard Carvel, Ralph Percy, 
Ralph Marlow, Stephen Brice, Clayton Halowell, 
Charley Steele, Jean Hugon, Marmaduke Howard, 
Count Karobke, Boris Godofsky, Louis De Lamoy, 
General Kapzen, Prince Meturof — what is he be- 
side these ? Everything is so small in life, in books 
things are so big. The world is already created, but 
fiction is still being written. If Adam were created 
by a novelist he would have fared much better. The 
story would never have ended happily. These won- 
derful heroes, what fine means they have, what splen- 
did opportunities, what glorious achievements, what 
great accomplishments are theirs. They can do just 
as they please, have fortunes to squander, and riot 
in luxuries. They are all born rich, or their rich rel- 
atives die early, and in good will. 
"In reality it is so different. We have to work for a 
living and poverty is our reward. In real life we have 
to write historical novels for a living. We have to 
write popular plays and pretty poems and sugar- 
coated stories. Yes, such is life, and there is poverty 
and the misery of the masses, and there are social 
problems and political evils — things unknown in 
the average novel, and in popular art generally. We 

214 



Our Rivals in FiSiion 

must do so much that is irksome in order to have a 
pleasurable moment. 

"When Richard Mansfield was delivering those 
sumptuous stump speeches in Shakespeare's spectac- 
ular melodrama of 'Henry V.' and the soldiers were 
stirred up to the highest pitch of enthusiasm, the fair 
fraulein in front of me constantly kept saying, 'Who 
would n't fight for Harry ?' Who would n't fight for 
Harry? A tremendous artist with superb words put 
into his mouth by Shakespeare,with a beautiful scenic 
background behind him, with gorgeous costumes 
and gleaming armor, with glowing ele6tric lights, 
with an army of well-drilled, well-paid supers, with all 
the pomp and power of a king on the stage — who 
wouldn't fight for Harry? But the poor, obscure, 
unknown Harry of real life, who faithfully fights 
against poverty, disease, despair, who battles for the 
right, for his honor and salvation, without scenic ef- 
fects, without any art, or author's directions, without 
any light or armor, without any aid or guides, with- 
out any one to show the way — this Harry, who will 
fight for him ? Who does not fight against him ? 
What fair damosel will deign to smile on him and 
shed some sunshine into his life ? 
" This was on a street car, and I overheard a young 
woman say to her escort, 'Ah, if you would only put 
your gloves on as Mansfield does in " Beaucaire" ! ' 
So this was the great thing in the play — the manner 
in which 'Beaucaire' donned his gloves. And yet — 
fool that I was — I had wondered why an a6tor of 

21^ 



Discourses of Keidanshy 

Mansfield'ssurpassingtalent should put onthestage 
such a trivial, trashy aifair. And I had gone without 
gloves all winter in order that I might be able to see 
Mansfield. Heavens ! But see, how the little niceties, 
the small delicacies and the petty graces on the stage 
and in books eclipse all our drudging and trudging, 
moiling and toiling in real life. We are expelled to 
observe them whatever else we do. Failing in these 
we fail to win afFe(5lions and are voted dead failures. 
Beside these we are expedled to do things that can 
only be done in books and on the stage, under the 
auspices of Alexandre Dumas the elder and Vidor 
Sardou, for instance. We are expelled to equal those 
magic creatures of the imagination, the heroes with 
their opulent supplies of good looks, words and 
wealth, and their strange power to do aught on earth. 
"James — we will call him that — is red-headed, 
freckled, plain, and generally not at all dudish. He 
is, however, true, loyal, devoted and determined to 
do some good in the world. He tries to meet her 
every day after work. He often brings a flower 
with him, tucked up in his sleeve. Once we saw him 
press it to his lips, for soon the bloom will be hers. 
But she is reading an historical novel, and even the 
flower fails to deliver his message and fades without 
fulfilling its mission. Of course, James has this ad- 
vantage over the ideal hero in the novel: that he 
really exists ; but what is reality to the glowing fancy 
of a youthful maiden P And in spite of his existence, 
where does James come in ? 

216 



Our Rivals in FiSiion 

"These are local and popular incidents I have men- 
tioned, but in a measure all literature, all art has 
created impossible dreams, unattainable ideals. 
This is probably the reason why so many aspira- 
tions have failed. They were not founded on reality. 
There are in life considerations 'without which the 
noblest dreams are a form of opium eating.' Who 
knows how many have gone grieving through life 
because they have followed the phantoms conjured 
up by the false standards of art ? With all that is 
great and grand, heroic and epic in real life there is 
still such a thing as 

' T^he high that proved too high, the heroic 

for earth too hard, 
T^he passion that left the ground to lose 
itself in the sky.* 
"Anyway, it is about time to protest against the 
false heroes of paper and ink, who cut us out of our 
earthly paradise, to give our rivals in fidion the 
death stab; about time to remember that that which 
is not cannot be great, and that all the beauty of this 
universe is in real life. It is about time to deny the 
existence of that which does not exist. 
" This demand for the superhuman is inhuman. We 
are not what we are not. We cannot do whatwe can- 
not do, and these platitudes are as profound as they 
are obvious. The weakness of the world is pointed 
out by its heromania. That we look for our heroes 
not in life but in artificial creations shows how blind 
we are. The most striking sign of our imperfedlion is 

217 



Discourses of Keidansky 

our longing for impossible perfecflion. Life has a 
great grudge against art. It has been slighted, disre- 
garded, abused. With its misleading models it has 
set up an unjust competition against life. The hope 
is that the artists to come will give life a hearing and 
adjust matters. As for the novelists, every time the 
good Mr. Howells horsewhips the swashbucklers I 
heartily applaud him. But I am not going to lay 
down any principles. I don't feel like it to-day. Per- 
haps things as they were were for the best. Perhaps 
it is for the dreams of women that there are real men 
in the world to-day. Perhaps it is their longing for 
the impossible that made the best that is possible 
to-day. I sometimes think that a woman's reason is 
the very acme of all wisdom. But I am going to 
treat this thing more fully in my volume of essays — 
if I ever get around to writing them." 



2t8 



XXIV 

On Enjoying One's Own Writings 

I WAS alone, ensconced in a corner of the noisy, 
smoky cafe, perusing the pages of a valued vol- 
ume. Keidansky walked in hastily, took up my 
book and looked at it. 

"How can you read anything that you have not 
written yourself?" he asked, with surprising solem- 
nity. "Why, I don't mind it any longer; I am used 
to it now," I mumbled in astonishment. But conver- 
sations with Keidansky are one-sided. Before I had 
formed half a thought he was all ready with speech. 
"You are coming down, dear fellow," he said; 
"you are compromising and becoming reconciled to 
everything. You cannot supply your own demand, 
so you are going elsewhere for your literature — 
spending on others your days and your nights that 
you may devote to the excavations of the things 
that lie deep and dormant within thyself. I wager 
that before long you will even be reading the clas- 
sics. You will abdicate from the sovereignty of your 
own genius, and measure life by the enjoyment that 
you derive from the things that other people do. 
" Aliens, foreigners, strangers as far away from you 
as different individuals are, millions of miles of im- 
passable icebergs impeding any possible approach. 
They were not born as you were born, they have 
not lived as you have lived, they have not loved as 

219 



Discourses of Keidansky 

you have loved, they have not hated as you have 
hated, they have not grappled with the agonies as 
you have, they have not died as you have over and 
over again, and yet — you read their books and pre- 
tend to enjoy them." 

I asked my friend to be seated, but he preferred to 
stand up, and with a charadieristic wave of the hand, 
showed his annoyance at being interrupted. " If you 
have not felt what I have felt," he said, "it is use- 
less for me to speak to you, and for you to enjoy 
what I write is hard and tedious labor. You cannot 
get behind the things others say, and all that re- 
mains for you to do is to read the meaning in so 
many words; and no meaning is ever absolutely 
uttered in so many words. There is almost always 
something unsaid behind the thing that is said. 
There is as much in as there is out. Thought is an 
endless chain of which we only see separate rings. 
We are fortunate to see that in the case of other 
persons. Most often you only hear and read their 
talk. But when you read your own thought, you 
read so vastly more than you have written, and you 
read the history of your thoughts, their far-away 
causes, their prehistoric origins, and their subter- 
ranean sources — and you enjoy it. You enjoy it, if 
you are intimately concerned in one near and dear 
personality, in the greatest study in all mankind — 
yourself. Also, if you are interested in the evolu- 
tion of human thought, and can see it through the 
operations of your own mind. 

220 



On Enjoying Ones Own W^ritings 

"We say in Yiddish about this or that person: ^ Kr 
kumt mit sich fun ein stedteL' Well, I, too, come from 
the same town with myself. I have gone through 
the dark labyrinth of life with myself in my hand. 
I have felt, experienced and known the same things 
that Keidansky has gone through, and — frankly — 
I enjoy my own writings. Sometimes my favorite 
works are my own. They move me, they stir me and 
they stimulate me to higher things. There is a qual- 
ity about them, more human, more intimate, more 
personal, that brings them nearer to me than any 
other writings. The pathos is so touching, the hu- 
mor so rollicking, the satire so pungent. It is all so 
effedive, significant and strong. Words, lines, sen- 
tences, pages that fall flat on the ears of another, 
they are pregnant with meaning, choked full of sug- 
gestion, and often so thrilling. That one has felt, 
thought, said, given birth to these things, is so fine; 
so splendid to watch a grand procession of the chil- 
dren of your brain — particularly when you are in- 
tuitively convinced that they are, well, a goodly and 
well-formed brood, and worthy of you. They have 
to be quite robust to withstand that uncomfortable 
critical sense. 

"You see, I want a personality, a man, a certain 
mental attitude, a sense of reserve force, deep-root- 
ed sincerity and determined intentions behind what 
I read, and I am sure of all that, in the case of my 
own writings. This gives one a feeling of gladness 
and joy. In the productions of others one mustgrope 

221 



Discourses of Keidansky 

in darkness, painfully explore, and so often search 
in vain for these qualities through their mental ma- 
noeuvres and spiritual contortions. 
"In our own work we can easily forgive the flaws, 
faults and shortcomings. We know why they exist, 
and to what to attribute them ; we realize that they 
are not due to lack of talent or any cause like that. 
Our charad;eristic carelessness, our hasty manner, 
impatience at the slow accommodations of mere me- 
chanical words, a desire to say too many things at 
the same time — if it is not the one, it is the other. 
But we know that we could do better if we wanted 
to; if we cared less about the matter than about the 
form. We know that the quality is there. There is 
nothing the matter with that. But somehow we can- 
not account so well for the crudities, defeds and de- 
formities in the performances of others, which jar 
upon us terribly and mar so much of our pleasure. 
Their failings are so flagrant, their meanings so neb- 
ulous, their ideas so hazy. It is all so far off and so 
unsatisfying. Why do people write things we do not 
like? Oh, the rogues, we answer ourselves, as the 
thought comes to us, they must be doing it for their 
own enjoyment. They can fill in the gaps, read in 
everything that is lacking; they can make master- 
pieces while they read their commonplace utterances 
— but we? We ought to read our own immortal 
works. We ought to, if we have any appreciation of 
great literature. 
"One great source of the enjoyment of our own 

222 



On Enjoying Ones Own Writings 

writings is that as we read we remember when each 
thought came to us, whence each idea sprang into 
birth, how each flying fancy originated, and every 
vaporous whimsy took shape. We go over the old 
ground, tread the paths of the past again, the paths 
overgrown with grass, or covered with the moss of 
the years, and we Hve our Hfe over again. Words, 
lines, paragraphs, pages ; each turn of a phrase brings 
one back to some turning-point of life; each flash 
of thought is the refledion of some vital incident. 
Behind every revolution of mind was a distind: 
period of evolution. Every old cry conjures up a 
crisis. That epigram sums up an entire epoch. This 
page is a condensed history of your heart. Yonder 
little etching, who knows of what stuff you have 
woven it? It all comes back to you so vividly, so 
graphically, so impressively. You read the things 
that you have written, no matter how long ago, and 
you live your life over again. The past reaches out 
its arms and hugs you to its tender breast again. 
" One night, far away from the city, nigh by the sea, a 
painful silence was broken by agonizing speech. One 
word, and the world that God had created in seven 
days was annihilated for you in a second. When you 
came back in the silence of a sleepless night you 
wrotein your note-book. ' Our dreams are crimes for 
which we are punished by the harsh reaUties of the 
world.' See how ideas evolve ! One day you were 
chided on the shortness of your stature. You said 
that you have not had any time to grow. Later you 

223 



Discourses of Keidansky 

said to some one else that the shape of one's destiny 
depends on the management of his time. 
" The origin of a thought is greater than the thought. 
It is often an entire drama; and you see it performed 
as you read. The crowding multitudes of memories 
that your literary produ6tions bring up ! This was 
suggested at a social gathering, where you felt dis- 
tressingly lonely, and it was such a soothing conso- 
lation. It was while witnessing a play that that idea 
came into your mind. The play was a popular suc- 
cess, so you were thinking your own thoughts. One 
night at a symphony concert you wrote on the edge 
of a programme : ' Music makes mute poets of us all.' 
You read it years after, and oh, the cherished recol- 
ledlions that it brings up ! But no one else can ever 
know how great that line is. Here is an idea that il- 
lumined your mind while in conversation with . 

There were so many delightful conversations, stir- 
ring discussions, endearing episodes ; there were 
scenes that you witnessed, events transpired of which 
you were part ; there were little dramas of which you 
were both the villain and the hero. They have all 
passed away, and yet you have saved them from ob- 
livion because you have written, and they cannot die. 
All things are immortal so long as you live. You 
read, and the old talks and the old walks, the things 
that you have seen and done, the joys you have felt 
and the sorrows you have endured come back and 
you enjoy them over again. You find this in your 
writings and so much more. The net results of your 

224 



On Enjoying Ones Own Writings 

own ruminations are so large that there is no won- 
der all other writers suffer from the comparison. 
Your writings are the plants, the weeds and the flow- 
ers that have grown out of your life, and their aroma 
and fragrance of earliest bloom follow you to the 
end of your days. There is that in your inner con- 
sciousness which you cannot find anywhere else. 
" The whole universe is within yourself; in others 
there is only a queer notion of it. Your crudest ex- 
pression has more feeling and thought behind it than 
the most beautiful expression of others. We all cher- 
ish and relish our own screeds. Are we not all con- 
vinced of their merits and superior qualities ? Are we 
not all anxious to secure editors and publishers ? And 
who rejeds them ? These editors and the publishers, 
the people who had nothing to do with the produc- 
tion of these undoubted works of genius. I have piles 
of scraps of old bits of paper and note-books up in 
my place, extending over a number of years. They 
contain stray fragments of thought that I have jotted 
down at all places and seasons and under all sorts of 
circumstances. As I come across them now and then, 
I not only re-experience what has long vanished, but 
I am again exalted unto all heights of human aspira- 
tion and inspiration. The foolishness and the follies, 
the faith and the fervor, and the blind hopes of my 
youth are mine again. 

" Once I was with some Jewish adiors, friends of 
mine, when a long-bearded, old-fashioned Israelite 
came in to offer them a play that he had written for 

225 



Discourses of Keidansky 

produdion. It was such a touching, thrilling story, 
the old man said, that it made him weep every time 
he read it — weep like a child over the sad compli- 
cations of the characters in his play. Oh, if he could 
only see it performed, it would melt, it would break 
his heart. Oh, if the adlors would only take it! And 
as he began to read parts of the first ad: we actually 
saw tears in his eyes. There you have it. What Dick- 
ens, what Tolstoy, what Perez, what Gordin could 
probably not do for this man, he had done for him- 
self. His own writings made him weep. Honestly, 
now," Keidansky broke out violently, "don't you 
enjoy your own effusions ? " 

I admitted that they often gave me pleasure, and 
that at other times I felt strongly disappointed over 
them. " Sometimes," I said, " I am puzzled and can- 
not account how I have done certain things. I say to 
myself that I must have been drunk to have been so 
witty ; or I imagine that I must have been in the com- 
pany of bright people to have been so dull. Often as 
I read I think that my stomach was out of order to 
make me so thoughtful. And again I am sure that I 
was awfully hungry to have been so ingenious." I 
confessed that I found it quite possible to overlook 
and forgive the faults of my own compositions, and 
that on the whole they were not infrequently a source 
of pleasure to me. I ventured to say that I also en- 
joyed a few things that other people have written. 
^' Well," said Keidansky, and then he became silent 
for awhile. 

226 



On Enjoying One s Own ff^ri tings 

" Immortal works are good enough to kill time," he 
said after a pause ; " but my own writings for real, 
downright enjoyment, every time. At the occasion 
of a big convention or political gathering in a cer- 
tain city the newspaper correspondents, I am told, 
present a striking scene as they assemble in the lobby 
of their hotel when the newspapers arrive. Each man 
rushes to the news-stand and buys ' his paper,' and 
loses not a minute before reading his own report. 
There they sit all together, oblivious even of a good 
piece of news, should it happen to be near them, each 
one buried in his newspaper, intently reading his 
complete account of the stormy proceedings, and 
many of them cursing and swearing at the stupid 
editors, ' who left out the best things.' Editors are 
always stupid and always leave out the best things ; 
but if they did n't they would be idiots. My point, 
however, is that this scene shows how much people 
enjoy their own writings. Each author has at least 
one great admirer. 

" And this is saying nothing of the gratification of 
writing, of the thrills of pleasure one feels, when a 
burst of inspiration breaks upon him, of the great, 
unutterable moments of exultation when a new 
heaven of thoughts opens before one's mind, of the 
joys of perpetuating the evanescent and the fleet- 
ing." ^ 

My friend was about to enumerate some more ex- 
amples, but it was growing late into the night, so I 
said : 

227 



Discourses of Keidansky 

" But you do read some things that eminent authors 
have written, do you not?" 

" Yes," said Keidansky, " but merely for purposes 
of comparison. I want to see how total is their 
eclipse ! " 



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015 909 997 



